Spammers suck. Here I am, minding my own business with my little blog and along comes a hacker. Somehow, they got into my site and added hidden text in my code which ultimately led to my being “blacklisted” by Google. Here’s part of the message Google wrote:
While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines… This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.
Then they go on to show me some of the hidden text they found (which I had already deleted) and I won’t repeat any of that here and get further penalized. Then:
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some of your webpages from our search results. Currently pages from thegolfchick.com are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.
Argh. Almost makes me want to return to blogger and alleviate the headaches. (Is that Google’s plan? Could it be an “inside job”? Am I a conspiracy theorist?) I have cleaned up my code to the best of my ability and submitted a request to Google for re-inclusion in the index. Meanwhile, my traffic is down significantly (as you might expect) and I suspect I might lose some PR in the process. I hope that none of this has altered the reader experience as I try to keep this site clean, organized and reader-friendly.
Good news for loyal readers
With much lower traffic, the current contest isn’t getting the number of participants it otherwise would. The contest will run until the prizes are given away, so regular readers have a better opportunity to swoop in and claim the prizes. Thank you for staying with me!
Google, please come back!
Update 5/12/08: They’re baaa-aaaack. Thanks, Google. 
May 3, 2008 at 5:11 pm
I had a similar problem, recently. They embedded a bunch of garbage links in a post. I also found a directory called “1” in the WordPress wp-content directory.
If I could get my hands on them. Grrrrr!
Hang in there and traffic will be up and flowing in no time (well, 30 days, but once you get over the frustration, the time will fly).
May 3, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Yeah, they also changed my upload directory from wp-content/uploads to a long string of /…/…/…/…/…, etc. and there were hidden files and text in there, too. What a hassle!
May 4, 2008 at 2:50 am
That was one reason why I had to dump my old site and have another one built. Sorry to hear it happened to you also…I too am struggling to get my traffic back up.
May 4, 2008 at 4:18 pm
GC-
When I click the “current contest” link, I get a password prompt window.
Sorry to hear about the sabotage of your site. I vote inside job. Is it just coincidence that it happened at exactly the same time as you brought home Vito? I think not. 😉
May 4, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Mr BG,
Sorry to hear that. I hope it comes back soon, and I hope I’m all better once Google reinstates me.
Eric, Thanks for the heads up. I fixed the contest link. Blaming the dog? Do you work for Google? 😉