Well, I was wondering where all my traffic had gone. Turns out that everything from Google had been dropped a few days ago, but its almost like the tap had been slowly turned off. Today, its nil.That’s right. My number one listing for “Tony Hung”, gone … although there are other listings, in addition to a splogportal entry for Deep Jive Interests (how ironic).
Anyway, the reason for the hate isn’t because of anything I said (hopefully — Google I love you!), but because my blog had been hacked. I presume it was because of some exploits that were known, and that was the reason I had hastily upgraded when I had found out to the most recent version, Wordpress 2.3.1, in addition to changing all my passwords.
I haven’t had any problems yet, but for those interested in the gory details, what had happened was my Template had been hacked so that the footer had included a number of hidden terms, such as “interracial brazilian asian free xxx stories big expression … ” and, well, you get the idea.
What had started happening was that my blog started getting indexed for *those* colorful terms, and … well, here we are today. I’ve re-applied for re-inclusion, so hopefully that will happen sooner rather than later now that my template’s been cleaned up.
I don’t know if what happened was directly because of an old Wordpress version I was running (2.2), but it behooves everyone to keep up with the updates.
November 7th, 2007 at 1:00 pm | Permalink
Yikes! That’s scary. Guess it’s time to bite the bullet and upgrade.
November 7th, 2007 at 1:04 pm | Permalink
For real.
I thought it was only one page until I scoped my Template — then I discovered *every* *single* *page* had this hidden stealth garbage on it.
I feel so … unclean .. :P
November 7th, 2007 at 2:22 pm | Permalink
Huh… you know that explains it… I did a search for “Deep Jive Interests” the other day on Google via the iPod Touch (haven’t set up the bookmarks yet) and noticed your site wasn’t showing up.
Paranoia… okay, time to upgrade my blog…
November 7th, 2007 at 3:06 pm | Permalink
It is a scary feeling to not see your blog ranking for its own URL. And sad. :P
November 8th, 2007 at 4:29 am | Permalink
Ouch, that sounds like a nightmare. I’ve never heard about hacked themes before, how does that work? Googling only serves me the friendly versions of hacking your WordPress theme to customize it. How do you hack a footer.php? If you want reply through other channels I completely understand ;)
November 11th, 2007 at 11:43 am | Permalink
It seems like you’re still affected by spam. According to a spam comment I’ve got after visiting your blog, the problem is your theme folder.
I can send a screenshot if you want one.
November 11th, 2007 at 3:57 pm | Permalink
I’m happy to get any help that I can Carsten.
anthony {dot} hung {at} gmail {dot} com.
Cheers!
November 11th, 2007 at 3:59 pm | Permalink
@Anne — I have no idea, but I wonder if they got root access somewhere / somehow …
April 7th, 2008 at 12:38 am | Permalink
[...] De-indexed. It happened to me, and the above, in retrospect, is the very reason for it. [...]