Site Loses All Google Rankings – Case Study Part 1
Last week one of my established sites lost all rankings. I actually witnessed 30+ high profile key phrases vanish from the Google index within minutes early one morning last week. I have of course lost rankings before as have most affiliates at some time. To see one of my major sites take such a hit though was simply sickening. Surely this must be a severe Google penalty?
First port of call was Google Webmaster Tools but to my dismay there were no errors or messages. Next I checked the site, checked the RSS feed, checked the source code of pages in the browser and even the Google cache but I could see nothing wrong at all. I even checked the back links and search queries in case the site had been subjected to some form of attack but I could not find anything wrong.
Next port of call was the main webmaster forums to see if others had experience any drastic changes in SERPS but again nothing. Even the other site on the same Cpanel account was ranking as normal so at this stage I simply thought that the only explanation could be that I had simply been penalised by Google. That was until I checked the main urls with the Fetch As Google Bot Tool! Using this tool to check the main urls I could see dozens of injected spam links on every page. It seems that the injected links could only be seen by Google Bot.
After a few hours searching the sites source files I found a couple of php files with the dreaded Eval string. I posted the string into a base 64 decoder just to clarify it was the source of my problems. Indeed it was! Next I pasted the string into Google but was unable to find an exact match. It looked like my site had been targeted to lose it rankings. The spam links did not even link to actual sites as the domains did not exist. Searching the internet I found others who had been subjected to this sort of attack but they could trace the links to pharma sites. Perhaps this was simply an attack to destroy my sites SERPS?
Today I did find something similar on the Webmaster World forum so perhaps for those interested in this episode the thread is well worth a read.
I’m going to go into this in far more detail once I have my site back up and running again. I’m wondering though how many others have had this sort of thing happen to them and simply put it down to a Google penalty rather than find the actual source of the problem?
