Hacked and Whacked

This blog is a hobby of mine, and for some time I’ve been inactive and haven’t found the time to take care of it. Well, that was a serious mistake on my part.

I checked the stats periodically and noticed a decline in visitors.  Not uncommon with a stagnant blog and I guess its to be expected. What I didn’t realize is that I had been hacked which in turn led me to getting whacked in Google.

Pure ignorance on my part.

Had I looked at the Webmaster Tools dashboard I would have seen that the keywords associated with my blog were unrelated to the actual content.  Nothing that I ramble on about incoherently was listed. The top 16 keywords are all related to crappy pill peddlers and their wares.

I also did a related:fuzzuck.com search and saw the same thing. I checked the cached version of a number of pages and saw nothing suspicious. I viewed the source code and there was nothing unusual visible to me.

So now I’m wondering how Fuzzuck.com became related to pill peddling and where the keywords associated with it were being pulled from. The source code was clean.

What I didn’t realize is that if I would have viewed the text only version of the pages, I would have seen the large amount of hidden links below the footer.  I fired up Firefox and used User Agent Switcher set to Googlebot and there it was. Enough hidden links to my pages to choke a humpback whale.

So now its time to fix the problem. First thing, put up a temporary index page. Make copies of  my images, back up the data base. Wipe all of the existing content from the server and upload the latest version of WordPress.  Restore the content and file a reconsideration request detailing what happened.

Now, we wait and see. Hopefully, we’ll be back in the index before too long. Interestingly enough, there were no messages in Webmaster Tools advising me that my site was removed from the index because we got hacked. I guess not all webmasters are created equal in Google’s eyes.