Over A Million Pages Hacked For SEO

Last week I brought you a story about a Melbourne retailer who’s SEO got clobbered. I soon worked out that the story was much bigger than I first thought and did a follow up the next day specifically about Ugg Australia. So far I have found over million web pages in the .com.au space that have been hacked by Chinese counterfeiters sell rip off brands. I found these pages just by examining three brands Ugg, Vuitton and Kors. As you will see from today’s video there are companies and organisations all over the world been affected by this.

Fixing SEO Post Hack

If you have been hacked usually it will fall into one or two broad categories. In the case of the counterfeiters they are just using your domain rent free to sell their stuff. A bit like someone setting up a shop inside your business without your knowledge. It’s annoying and definitely harmful to your SEO . If Google works out you’ve been hacked you will see a message like this.

In the case of this example they lost their accommodation related rankings, a fairly big deal. If you fix your site properly you can get this notice removed in hours.

More Hacking To Come

I was talking to our head of development Jine and she explained that the Chinese Universities don’t teach PHP for the most part. They focus a lot on MS based technology, so there are a lot of excellent programers specialising in hacking MS sites. By the looks of it, there is good money in it too. Let’s hope they don’t start developing PHP experts any younger!

It looks like the magazine “That’s Life” has fixed their hacks although the Google index is still littered with the injected pages.

The index will clean up in time if you have fixed the hacks. In the case of Avon Lodge it has reduced by 50% but they have not gone into webmaster tools and alerted Google to the fix so they still have the hacked notice. If you have been hit let us know and we see if we can help.

SEO Webinar

It’s on again next week! Don’t miss out this time. We had over 100 people get locked out so we have increased capacity this month. Hope to see you there.
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/3383896930517362690