In 2010 there will be an election in Brazil and one of the candidates, the governor of Sao Paulo, Jose Serra of the PSDB – Conservative Party, a rival of President Lula – has always been protected by the media (TV’s, newspapers and magazines in Brazil are in the hands of conservatives).

On 13/11/2009 there was a serious accident in one of the works of the governor, called Rodoanel (like “Ring Road”). There are many allegations of corruption in this work.

I saw on a site that Serra had ordered to Google to not publish the accident in the Rodoanel. At first, I thought that’s a joke. I like Google and did not believe there was this kind of manipulation. I always knew of the manipulation in newspapers and magazines, but in Google? I could not believe it…

Well, try to find a picture of the Rodoanel accident there. I tried but I could not find anything. Not a single image. The complaint is on this site (portuguese): http://cloacanews.blogspot.com/2009/11/serra-mandou-google-obedeceu-sistema-de.html

This is not scary?
(sorry my poor english)

I think you could overcome your problem with a properly constructed robots.txt, first with allows for all pages that are part of your site, then a disallow for the entire site.

I’d advise Matt and all other WordPress site owners to check for infection. This hack looks nasty.

Your article was good reading. On Monday of this week Sep 17, 2007, I received a message from Google telling me that some pages(my Index page) from my site had been removed for 30 days, due to hidden data on the page.

They sent us the hidden data.

We did find that there was hidden data on the page. The hidden data, which we had no idea was there, was a duplication of our sites description. The only thing we can surmise is that during the original construction of our site 7 years ago, the web page designer copied, or started a description on the web page which was later revised.

I am not a web designer, but I have assumed the position of a webmaster on my site. After our site was designed, I took control of the site, and edit the site with Front Page. I do not use code. Period.

Because I do not use code, I cannot see the code on the site. Using Front Page, I do not need code. I have no idea if something else is on my site because I never look at the code. It is a foreign language to me.

I have taken the necessary steps for to have the pages reincluded.

However, I do have some serious issues with the manner in which Google handled this, and the consequences it has had on my small business.

It seems strange, that Google does not send out some sort of warning letting someone know that their site is not in compliance with Googles Policies, and allow them time to correct them.

To just remove pages from your search engine has great consequences on a small business. Our internet sales dropped over 50% over the weekend, after our pages were removed from the search engine.

In the seven years we have been on the web, we have gained good positons for our products, now our products are not listed at all, and we have no idea what kind of placement we will get when we are reinstated.

Our site does not even show up on google search. It’s like we have disappeared off the face of the earth.

Based on the email I received, we will be removed for 30 days. This will have a terrible effect on our business, in the busiest part of our season.

When looking at the information that was hidden, the employee at Google should have been able to determine that this was not an intentional act. He could readily see that it was a duplication of the pages description.

We had no idea it was there, but we are paying a huge price for a small error.

Can you give me any suggestions. We have found that we cannot contact Google.

Ken Fallaw

Thanks.

But anyways, good insight into how google deals with hacked websites. However, if you type text containg rape and animal porn you still come up with alot of perverted sites, often containing harmful scripts waiting to be run on un-protected users. Why aren’t these sites automatically black listed? Or maybe I didn’t grasp the concept.

Two things, at least, here:

1. You say it is the web masters responsibility but how on earth can anyone keep on top of things that are going on in the background when it is coming through hosting companies and blogs (for example). My example is so similar to the one you site above, and when a search was done I saw ‘Brown University”, “Duke University” and many many others that may not be known by name but are going through the same hack.

2. Why is Google indexing this sick porn in the first place. Web masters would not have to worry about it if you had a filter – or at the very least put them in their own search index and leave businesses alone.

Jan

Our site was hacked about a year ago, but we only discovered it recently. The hackers installed hundreds of malicious pages on our server unknown to us (and not visible to regular site visitors). These pages dealt with with: porn, online pharmacy/drugs, gambling, etc.

When I checked using Google Webmaster Tools (Page Analysis), it showed that common words “In your site’s content” was primarily full of these bogus terms, and, the words “In external links to your site” was showing almost 100% malicious terms. Needless to say, out former top ranking and Google traffic has been demolished, and we rank only #50 for our *own name*!

To correct, we flushed out our server, reset password, and freshly installed our site. Using Google URL removal tool, we had all the malicious pages we could find succesfully removed from the index. Also, we set up 409 redirects (“page gone”) in our .htaccess file. for these bad pages.

We made a Google re-inclusion request, but this will probably be ignored because our site was actually successfully being indexed (just not for the correct, legitimate terms!).

Just checked Webmaster Tools again, and eureka, the common words “In your site’s content” seem to be OK now, BUT, the words “In external links to your site” is still showing almost 100% malicious terms. Since Google places heavy emphasis on incoming links, I fear that our site has been permanently destroyed because there is no way we can stop those bad 3rd party links (the hackers must have set up some sort of interlinked network of fake pages on many other sites). There are thousands of these bad and unrelated incoming links, and they probably far outweigh our on-topic legitimate links.

What can we do? Is our site permanently “finished” in the eyes of Google?

Any advice or assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

SS