Earlier this month CenterNetworks was converted from Drupal to WordPress. Part of the conversion resulted in several of the CN sites getting hit with an exploit. It appears that one of the CN sites might have actually been hit earlier and I just never noticed it and only upon CN getting hit did I realize this other site was also hit.
This other site apparently lost most of its “Google Juice” which resulted in a major reduction in organic search site traffic. Here’s a graph of the before, during and after.
At the lowest point, nearly 70% of Google-referral traffic to the site in question was lost. As you can see from the chart above, slowly the Google Juice has been restored and we are back to normal traffic today. Phew, at least now I can get the investors off my back.
What did I learn from this experience? Google indexes sites very quickly but it seems to take about two weeks for the Google search crawlers to update an entire site. From what I can tell, there’s no real way to tell Google that a site was infected and that it is now clean of bad links. There is a re-inclusion request form but I’ve never received any feedback when I have submitted that form in the past so no idea if it actually worked. More importantly, the experience made me realize just how much Google controls how this site does monetarily each and every day.
3 Responses
You can make google index your sites faster in the webmaster central.. also, if your site got listed in the malware list temporarily that might explain the loss of traffic.
There seems to be alot of malicious i frame cn virus injections going around lately. One common factor that stands out amongst alot of sites getting compromised is that they choose a weak password consisting of a nickname or word easily found in the dictionaries these hackers use.
Make you password very long consisting of lower and upper case letters, numbers, and symbols. Do not use any word commonly found in dictionaries.
This should go along way in making your site more secure from these types of attacks.
[…] have been exploited so many times, the hackers are sharing some of their link revenue with me. My sites have also lost a lot of Google juice and I am not even sure that all of the sites are back to normal in the Google […]