More on MotorcycleColorado.com Hacking
I’ve made a lot of progress but this website is still suffering the effects of being hacked. I’ve come up with some answers to some of the questions that were driving me crazy and I thought you might be interested.
By the way, this image is from Google Webmaster Tools, showing what in Google’s mind my website is all about. Yeah, sure, this website is all about male potency drugs. You bet.
But that’s what I finally figured this is about. You see, nobody ever saw the junk pages that were planted on my site. There was only one thing that outwardly suggested something was amiss, and that was the Google ads on the site. Those are supposed to be related to the subject matter on the site, so you would think on MotorcycleColorado.com the ads would be for motorcycle parts, gear, rental, whatever.
But no, the ads showing were for this drug, because the junk pages the hacker inserted were all about C—–. (I’m not going to name the drug because I don’t want it associated with this site.) That caused Google to display ads for the drug, and presumably someone was getting more traffic to their sites where they sell the stuff. And that’s why some asshole caused me all this trouble.
And it’s stupid! No one comes to this site for those drugs. All they managed to do was kill my traffic. I can tell you exactly how many people clicked on the drug ads since the hacking was done and you can count them all on two hands. Meanwhile, it has taken me countless hours to fix all this.
Apparently this is pretty common for this product. When I went looking for remedies to my problems I found that there is a whole category of advice for webmasters facing exactly this problem. Seems to me like Google ought to be doing some serious examination of who benefits from this and kicking some advertisers out of their program.
Fortunately, things are slowly getting back to normal, at least as far as Google is concerned. But I still need to do the same sort of recovery work with Bing, Ask, Yahoo!, and any other search engines worth the trouble.
So what have I learned from all this? It doesn’t matter if you can’t remember it and have to look it up every time, use a REALLY strong password. I admit, my previous password was too simple. I didn’t figure my site was worth anyone hacking. I was wrong. Now my password is longer, has lower case, upper case, special characters, and doesn’t spell anything. Can I remember it? No way. But I don’t think a burglar is going to break into my house and search through my papers to find the password to my website.
Now if I could just have two minutes alone with this asshole and a baseball bat . . .
Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
AMA contest offers on-track riding school and a byline
Biker Quote for Today
Never be ashamed to unlearn an old habit.
Tags: hacked website
