I’m glad I’ve finally got the blog back up after getting hacked and whacked, and I’m re-indexed in Google. Kudos to the guys and gals at the plex; it was back in less than 48hrs over a week-end. Wonder if the reconsideration request for hacked sites is automated in any way?
My thanks to my web host TotalChoice Hosting as well. Fantastic and prompt support. Everything was taken care of minutes, yes, minutes. Thanks again!
Here’s a wonderful post that would have helped me out if I was aware of the feature in Webmaster Tools, so for those of you who are not:
How to use Fetch as Googlebot
Has your site ever dropped suddenly from the index or disappeared mysteriously from search results? Have you ever received a notice that your site is using cloaking techniques? Unfortunately, sometimes a malicious party “hacks” a website: they penetrate the security of a site and insert undesirable content. Sophisticated attackers can camouflage this spammy or dangerous content so that it doesn’t appear for normal users, and appears only to Googlebot, which could negatively impact your site in Google’s results.
In such cases it used to be very difficult to detect the problem, because the site would appear normal in the eyes of the user. It may be possible that only requests with a User-agent: of Googlebot and coming from Googlebot’s IP could see the hidden content. But that’s over: with Fetch as Googlebot, the new Labs feature in Webmaster Tools, you can see exactly what Googlebot is seeing, and avoid any kind of cloaking problems.
Nice addition to the Labs feature. I guess it’s time I paid more attention to the blog and Webmaster Tools.