SEO results hacked?
-
Hi there,
Since last Saturday I noticed a big traffic drop on at least the following two pages:
http://www.smartphonehoesjes.nl/apple/ and http://www.smartphonehoesjes.nl/apple/iphone-6/.I did some research and I noticed something realy strange. Unknown sites seems to hijacked my organic results by using the exact same page title and META description but leading traffic to another their domain. Look at those pictures: http://imgur.com/v6kglLU and http://imgur.com/Whx4l8K.
Edit: a competitor seems to have a same problem: http://imgur.com/Zzhter4. I just fetched both URL's in GWT as Google. In Bing there is a little sign of this problem too, so this is not a Google only thing.
Can anybody please help me here? This has cost me some real money since Saturday.
Tnx in advance.
Marcel
-
Hi Dirk,
After contacting Google by phone and mail, filing a few more spam reports and refreshing textual content, we got our results back and traffic/revenue has grown since. We are very happy, and no other pages got attacked (yet).
Thanks for your help.
Marcel
-
Marcel,
When you contact the site owners - a good guideline on 'how to clean' can be found here: https://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_My_site_was_hacked (specifically for Wordpress) - more in general: http://www.google.com/webmasters/hacked/ - it could be that the hackers gained access by a security issue with the slider (http://wptavern.com/critical-security-vulnerability-found-in-wordpress-slider-revolution-plugin-immediate-update-advised) so they should certainly check that Wordpress & it's plugins are up-to-date.
Good luck!
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk,
Let's hope the hacker only copied a few pages and not the entire site. What could a site like soft-solutions possibly do to clean their site? I think it's worth a chance to ask planchemag and wearemash to do the same. My new URL shows up if you search for 'iphone 6 / 6s hoesje', that's something positive. I filed a request for deletion of the old and hacked URL of the iPhone 6 page, hopefully Google throws it out and picks up the new and clean one like it does with the other search query.
I can do nothing but wait now I guess. I will keep you updated here.
Marcel
-
Hi Marcel,
I have the impression that soft-solutions.nl already discovered that they have been hacked & have cleaned their site in the mean time.
It's possible that the hacker only copied 1/2 pages - it's however more likely that they copied the full site but that the other pages haven't been indexed yet. Idem for copyscape - if the hack only occurred recently, these tools (and Google) haven't been able to pickup all pages yet.
When I search for 'iphone 6 hoesje' I get the planchemag.com site. As all these pages are duplicates, it's Google who's deciding which page it's going to show. Google decided that in some cases the hacked version is the preferred one, for other queries people will still get to your site. It probably depends on the anchors the hackers used to the hacked site. The volume of iphone 6 is probably higher than iphone 5 queries, so they will probably have used anchors containing 'iphone 6' to point to the site.
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk,
That second result is our homepage, I see that this one got indexed at the exact same time our own homepage got indexed. However, Google shows our (the good one!) homepage in the search results.
That's quite ironical indeed, the webdesign company.
The other result redirects to planchemag.com, which only gives one result on a site:www.planchemag.com/. What about this one?
Is it possible this hack only limits to those two pages?I used the tool copyscape.com and it seem to be only the following pages that are affected:
What about this one: search for site:soft-solutions.nl and you'll find our iPhone 5/5s pagina. Search for 'iPhone 5 hoesje' and Google shows our correct page as a result. How is this possible?
Marcel
-
Hi Marcel,
If I do a site:www.wearemash.com there seem to be only 2 pages from your site indexed at the moment - possible that the other ones haven't been picked-up by Google yet. Quite ironical that the domain wearemash.com belongs to a web design company.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk,
I just set the redirect, just to be sure. This is a realy bad thing, people can abuse Google to negatively impact a whole company and lots of individuals. That should not be possible, hope Google will fix this soon!
You assume the whole site will go down in Google and not only those two pages? This will be terrible.
Marcel
-
Hi Marcel,
Don't think that it will change a lot. If the hack is done in the same way as the other cases (which seems to be the case), they copied your entire site into the site which has been hacked. They present this version to Google (cloaking - as you can see in the cached version) - but "normal" visitors are redirected to a different e-commerce site. To make sure the hacked site is positioned well, they point hundreds of links from other hacked sites to the cloned version of your site. So whatever you change on your site, will not impact the cloned version, which will keep it's position, until Google takes action.
It's a quite a simple trick, and to be very honest, I am surprised that Google is not capable to detect it.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk,
This should be a Google task to prevent her customers/users from those kind of hackers right?
Do you think that redirecting my iPhone 6 page to a new URL would help? I can imagine the hackers hijacked an URL, when I pick a new one and 301 redirect the old one to the new, will my own result show up again?
I already spoke with Google this morning and they are going to look after it.
Marcel
-
Hi Marcel,
It seems to be a plague recently- there where similar cases on Moz the last two weeks: http://moz.com/community/q/chinese-site-ranking-for-our-brand-name-possible-hack (similar situation as you) - a site being hacked http://moz.com/community/q/getting-different-search-queries-in-google-webmaster. It seems the hackers are exploiting a vulnerability in the slider used on these Wordpress site.
Apart from filing spam reports there is not much more you can do. You could inform the site owners that their site has been hacked & ask them to clean it, but I fear that these hackers are capable to switch sites quite fast.
Good luck,
Dirk
-
Hi Matt-POP,
Thanks for this opening, didn't look at it this way. All our domains got replaced by wearemesh in the cached page. The VWO code looks like ours, so do you really think they were testing? All of the source code is ours, also the canonical, only the domain got replaced by theirs..
We are using VWO but we are doing it by ourself. I'm not sure VWO is the problem.
This problem occured last Saturday. What we did on Friday is make our website mobile friendly for the scheduled 21st of April mobile Google update. Is this coincidence? The two companies who helped us with this change, made some changes to the canonical tags among other things.
A strange thing here is that a competitor has a same problem, wouldn't that seem like a conscious action (hack)?
@Patrick: We don't know them, for sure. If you go to the unkknown website, you see that they don't use our meta data, so that's the strange part.
Update: the domain www.wearemesh.com now redirects to www.ovsee.com, the same website you got redirected to when you click on the hacked result of the competitor I wrote about. The visual URL there is Finan.nl. This Ovsee.com looks like the perpetrator. But I still can't get a grip on it.. the other hacked result leads to www.planchemag.com which redirects to http://planchemag.fr.
What can I do to get my results back? I already filed a spam report in GWT.
Thanks again,
Marcel -
Their Google cache results were somehow corrupted temporarily:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wearemash.com%2F
There's a VWO code in there:
So it looks like they were split testing. The canonical is set to their domain which is why they took over results temporarily on these search terms.
It looks like the split test somehow grabbed your page info & theirs and split tested it giving theirs a canonical on your content. That would do it.
Are you using VWO? Are you using these guys to do your conversion optimisation? You may have the same conversion company who made a mistake or you may have the same VWO designer. I'm not sure how it got there but looking at the code, VWO does look to probably factor into the problem.
-
Hi Marcel
Quick question - I know you said "unknown", but are you sure that this site has nothing to do with your site? Like, did they develop or design your site at all?
Here is a help section from Google on these sorts of issues - it covers everything from cloaking to content scraping, and doorway pages to other spam types.
I would try contacting the webmaster of this site and asking them to remove your titles/meta descriptions. If they do not respond, or are not willing to cooperate, reference the resource above as Google has steps to take to ensure action is taken against sites that do this sort of thing.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions or need more help, good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO Links in Footer?
Hi, One of my clients uses a pretty powerful SEO tool, won't mention the name. They now have a "link equity" tool, which they are using on a lot of their client's sites, which include tons of fortune 500 companies. It involves add footer links to your site that change based on the content of the page they are on. The machine learning tries to figure out the most related pages and links to them with the heading tag of that page as the anchor text. Initially this sounds very spammy to me. But then, it seems a lot like "related products" tools that many companies use. The goal for this tool is to build up internal linking, especially for deeper pages on their site. They have over 10,000 currently. What are everyone's thoughts on this strategy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vetofunk2 -
WordPress Tags and SEO
Good Morning everyone, I am trying to decide how I am going to handle an issue on two WordPress websites. I recently acquired 2 new clients that used to do business with the same SEO company. Neither of the clients know of the other but both had the same story about said SEO company. The usual complaints, I wont get into details. My issue is the old SEO company basically was spamming keywords and utilized tags to do this. For each of these clients they had very thin spammy blog posts written and then had a multitude of spammy tags used as keywords here is an example https://captainjacksboatingschool.com/middlesex-county-boating-safety-class/ Each one of these tags is creating duplicate content. How do i properly handle these tags? Do i delete? Do i need to redirect into one main page after deletion. I much rather use plain English and authoritative based Categories. In fact I never use tags, only categories. They do not seem to have much seo value. Both clients who were with this company have the same Tag setup... Any advice would be greatly appreciated as I do not want to loose the customers current rank because i want to do things my way Thanks, Don Silvernail
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
International SEO question
We are based in the UK, if we make sure to do the following .com domain
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson
US Phone number
US currency 201
US language Content
server is CDN in the US
Language Meta Tags
Local Search Registration
geographic target via Google Webmaster Tools would the domain under a UK company registrant be an issue for google thinking we are US based and have any impact on rankings.0 -
Hiding Elements on Mobile. Will this effect SEO.
Hey guys and gals, I am hiding elements with @media sizes on the mobile experience for this site. http://prepacademyschools.org/ My question is when hiding elements from mobile, will this have a negative effect on rankings for mobile and or desktop? Right now it is a hero banner and testimonial. My interest is because I feel responsive is now working against conversions when it comes to mobile because desktop typically has the same info several times where mobile it can be repetitive and only needed once. Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brightvessel1 -
Hacked site vs No site
So I have this website that got hacked with cloaking and Google has labeled it as such in the SERPs. With due reason of coarse. My question is I am going to relaunch an entirely new redesigned website in less than 30 days, do I pull the hacked site down until then or leave it up? Which option is better?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Sitelinks Search Box impact for SEO
I am wondering how the relatively new sitelinks search box impacts the SEO rankings for a specific site or keyword combination - do you guys have any experience or bechmarks on this? Obviously it should help on getting more real estate on the SERP page (due to adding the search box), but do you also get extra goodwill and improved SERP position from adding it? Also, is the impact different on different type of terms, let's say single brand or category term such as "Bestbuy" (or "coupon") or a combination term "Bestbuy Apple" (or "Dixons coupon")? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tjr0 -
Press Release SEO. More than 90 press released in prweb. How good for seo
One of a competition sites known to us has published 90 press releases of all upcoming car models with PRWEB, PR7, DA 97 in last 4 months. All with different anchor based keywords and links. The page authority too is very high in some of them around 70 Though they might have had spent a sum, does this really influence from SEO perspective. If yes, can 10 press releases with PR Newswire which has PR8 and DA as 95 can be good if we consider doing this with all unique anchor text & links
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi0 -
Help for a complete SEO newbie!
Hi all, I've just joined seomoz today to try and further my very young education on SEO. My major problem is i need my site to rank high in local search engines but feel that none of the customers read much of the content as i am a landscaper and feel they just search "landscaping in Newcastle" and are immediatly looking for a contact number to arrange a free estimate. I dont do any online sales, its just to generate leads. I've spent alot of time building a better site than my local competitors but they still out rank me on alot of keywords i.e. "Driveways in Gateshead" My question is do i keep adding more and more content hoping this will work long term or do i link build with anchor text etc or both? I cannot believe they still out rank me when i feel i have more links more anchor text and a load more origional content and images. I think it may be that my site is still under 1 year old. I feel i am boucing from content to link building then trying something else without any real knowlegde of what i really should be doing or what should be the priority at this young stage for my site. I have managed to get on page 1 of google for most of my keywords in local searches ( obviously not national) but still feel its been more down to luck and effort than actually knowing what i am doing when it comes to site and offsite optimization Any help, tips etc would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks John
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | totaldriveways0