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
-
Best seo benefit location ( main page text or h1 , h2)?
i have learned that h1 has more value than h2 and h2 has more than h3, but lets say if i want to place my keywords in there. should i include them in the main body or should take advantage of header tags?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sam09schulz0 -
Hacked Websites (Doorways) Ranking First Page of Google
Hello Moz community! I could really use your help with some suggestions here with some recent changes I've noticed in the Google serps for terms I've been currently working on. Currently one of the projects I am working on is for an online pharmacy and noticed that the SERPs are being now taken up by hacked websites which look like doorways to 301 redirect to an online pharmacy the hacker wants the traffic to go to. Seems like they may be wordpress sites that are hacked and have unrelated content on their websites compared to online pharmacies. We've submitted these issues as spam to Google and within chrome as well but haven't heard back. When searching terms like "Canadian Pharmacy Viagra" and other similar terms we see this issue. Any other recommendations on how we can fix this issue? Thanks for your time and attached is a screenshot of the results we are seeing for one of our searches. 1Orus
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | monarkg0 -
Dodgy backlinks pointing to my website - someone trying to ruin my SEO rankings?
I just saw in 'Just discovered' section of MOZ that 2 new backlinks have appeared back to my website - www.isacleanse.com.au from spammy websites which look like they might be associated with inappropriate content. 1. http://laweba.net/opinion-y-tecnologia/css-naked-day/comment-page-53/ peepshow says: (peepshow links off to my site)07/17/2016 at 8:55 pm2. http://omfglol.org/archives/9/comment-page-196 voyeur says: (voyeur linking off to my site)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
July 17, 2016 at 7:58 pm Any ideas if this is someone trying to send me negative SEO and best way to deal with it?0 -
What sources do you use to keep on top of SEO news?
I want to try building an RSS feed of SEO news... but not wanting to find myself drowning in materials As such, looking for a short list of recommendations for keeping on top of SEO developments – the impetus is that I'm still discovering changes that happened 2, 3, even 5 years ago, and I want to try and catch these things as they happen. Thinking something actually from Google may be on the list, but some of these sources are pretty on top of things! Seroundtable.com also comes to mind. But what do you use to keep informed? Thanks 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ntcma1 -
Negative SEO impacting client rankings - How to combat negative linking?
I have a client which have been losing rankings for the key term "sell gold" in Google AU. However, while doing some investigating I realized that we have been receiving links from bad neighborhoods such as porn, bogus .edu sites as well as some pharmaceutical sites. We have identified this as negative SEO and have moved forward to disavow the links in Google. However, I would like to know what other measures can be taken to combat this type of negative SEO linking? Any suggestions would be appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dancape0 -
Banner Ads help seo?
I see in OSE banner ads counting ads as incoming links - My question is has anyone done a study showing a non tagged banner ad link and its effects on seo? Does google counting it as organic since it has no tagging or since its in a ad spot its ignored?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0 -
Any e-commerce users recommend an SEO company for link building?
I manage an e-commerce site. I wanted to know if anyone has worked with an SEO company for link-building that they would recommend. I DO NOT want articled directories, bookmarks, etc.. I want real link-building from credible/related sites. If you would give me an idea of the results or the general process they use I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
You're a SEO manager for a new company working on a new site. Where to?
So, you've recently begun as a SEO manager for a new company who's just launched a lovely, gleaming corporate site to boot. The onsite stuff is taken care of and your attention turns to link building. Now you've been in the game for a few years. You've seen things change in that time. Directories are out. Link networks are done. You're not going to embark on reciprocal linking either because it's bad and looks horribly tacky. Black Hat, White Hat - you know the score. You're lucky that the company produces a page or two of news a day - it's original, informative, is great for keeping your clients informed and you punt this on Twitter and FB. A bit of link bait, eh? But there's a rub: your competitors, with their bigger budgets, and industry clout, have been around for a some time longer than your company has been. They've snapped up all the good (industry-related) sites to get links from. You've approached all potential targets with the offer of good, relevant content and affiliate partnerships but they aren't having any of it. You're simply out-sized by the big boys next door - you can't compete. They're rich kids. There just seems nowhere to get links from. Do you just go the route of press releases and articles? Do you use paid blogging services? Grovel at doorsteps. The industry you're in is incredibly commercial - no meek altruist is going to take pity and give you a couple backlinks out of kindness. What do you do? What indeed...?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Martin_S0