A few months ago, Drugshopworld.com hacked our site and inserted page after page of links to sales of illegal drugs.
We thought we had cleaned up the mess, but apparently not.
Here is the message I got from Google this morning:
Dear site owner or webmaster of adistantsoil.com,
While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.
The following are some example URLs from your site:
http://adistantsoil.com/322b?sodia=3100
http://adistantsoil.com/328f?sodia=4271
http://adistantsoil.com/32a9?sodia=2376
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from adistantsoil.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.
We would prefer to keep your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-been-hacked-now-what.html. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.
Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team
Note: if you have an account in Google’s Webmaster Tools, you can verify the authenticity of this message by logging into https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview?hl=en and going to the Message Center.
I’ve sent the note to my webmaster, and I assume she can fix it, but if not we’re going to need some help.
I’ve read that Google will take down sites completely, but losing our indexing can really kill our traffic, too. I also don’t know if this is limited to those added “sodia” pages that the hacker inserted. We’ll see what happens.
I’ve had many complaints from people that they could not register to comment at the site, but it is because of this hack that I keep registration closed most of the time. The hacker gained access via registration.
If you want to register, send me a note and I will set up an account for you. Don’t forget to tell me your preferred username.
c
PS: Am I the only one who sees the irony in Google delivering a take down notice to me because of a hack, but leaving up hundreds of pirate sites, many of which illegally load tens of thousands of books every day?
Just asking.
