Ivany » Cracked

Getting Delisted from Google Sucks

Jeff Ivany — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:33:33 +0000

Getting delisted from Google sucks a whole lot as you can see from the graph below.

Google Analytics graph showing how our visits were impacted by being delisted from Google

Some of you may recall that my site was cracked late last year. This resulted in a large quantity of hidden spam links getting added to my site which resulted in Google removing Ivany.org from their search engine.

I was averaging somewhere around 200 hits a day (not bad for a silly little site like this) and I watched that go down to about 3 in a matter of hours. Ouch! I did get a few direct visits from people I know and a very small number from other search engines.

On January 3, 2009 I was added back into Google and that day I jumped back up to to about 75 hits. I’m not back to where I was before I got delisted yet but I hope to get there soon. I’m still showing up on the first page for most of the major topics on this site so I can’t complain too much.

I have learned a few things from being delisted though and I’ll try to put them together into a couple posts over the next couple weeks. There was one big warning sign that I missed simply because I didn’t know what I was looking for.

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Upgraded!

Jeff Ivany — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 01:16:46 +0000

Well, it was painful and took almost 2 days to get this far but I finally upgraded WordPress on my site. Getting cracked recently was definately the kick in the pants I needed to take the time to upgrade and re-work all of the stuff that got broken during the upgrade.

I’m living on the bleeding edge now and I like it!

There’s some stuff that’s still not quite working on the site but at the moment, I’m not too concerned. Anything that isn’t working is going to be disappearing soon. I hope. Stay tuned and hopefully I’ll have everything back to where I want it before the end of the year.

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Cracked!

Jeff Ivany — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:03:29 +0000

Well, I guess my time ran out. My website was cracked at some point in the last couple months. Someone managed to figure out my password (which was a really crappy password) and started adding a whole lot of hidden spam to my posts. Unfortunately I didn’t notice until Google sent me a message indicating that their search robot found spam on my site.

So this morning I’ve been cleaning, cleaning, cleaning and trying to determine what was touched. I have a few ideas on how the person got access and they are all due to crappy passwords. Now is a good time to remind everyone to create strong passwords. If you need some help, check out a site like Bad Neighborhood‘s Mnemonic Strong Password Generator. You shouldn’t use your pets, kids, grandkids, or common words for a password.

Oh, and to anyone who had a login/password on ivany.org – sorry, they have all been deleted now. I’m going to try to roll out a new website in the coming weeks so the timing of this isn’t so bad. Pretty much everything is changing.

Update: Well, this sucks. At first I didn’t think I had been de-listed from Google but now it seems I have been. Crappy. Here’s hoping they get to my “reconsideration request” sometime soon.

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