Crazy code made site invisible to Google

  • sauerswald

    (@sauerswald)


    12 years, 8 months ago

    We sustained a traffic hit just as we were migrating over to wpengine and wanted to see if anyone could help us figure out what happened and why. Our traffic still isn’t back to its pre-migration levels and we are wanting to solve the problem and grow again.

    So a number of things happened along the way.
    #1 – we were getting brute force attacks at our old host.
    #2 – we decided to switch to wpengine
    #3 – the migration began
    #4 – we switched from all-in-one SEO pack to WordPress SEO by Yoast
    #5 – we hired an SEO consultant to ramp us up on the WordPress SEO by Yoast

    AND then our traffic tanked. We went down to like 3 hits a day – it was brutal. We couldn’t find anything on webmaster tools – and when I searched for my own posts on google – using the title, my name, site name, all keywords – both logged in and out of google – no results at all. The posts were invisible to google – even though they had been trafficked heavily before. Or at the very least FINDABLE.

    Then we went through the site with a fine tooth comb and found this code – copied here – actually on the page for the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin on our site – and once we removed this code we could be found again. We have no idea how it got there.

    Yet now we still don’t have the traffic we once did – we’re at about 1/2 to 2/3 of what we had in mid-September.

    So any help anyone can give with what this code is, where it might have come from, and how to crawl back up in traffic – would all be appreciated.

    Thanks!

    code: ErrorDocument 503 “Site temporarily disabled for crawling”
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(bot|crawl|spider|80legs).*$ [NC]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots\.txt$
    RewriteRule .* – [R=503,L]

    http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • mikeotgaar

    (@mikeotgaar)

    12 years, 8 months ago

    It’s .htaccess code to deny access to search bots…
    The 503 part sends a ‘Gateway timeout’ error code

    How it got there? There’s a few possibilities

    1. Whoever moved the site to new host may have added this to the file during the migration process, then forgot to delete it. This is the best case scenario.
    2. A hacker managed to gain access to the files on the server – it may not even have been your site that got hacked, just another one on a shared hosting server.
    3. Someone else with file write / WordPress admin permissions deliberately included this. The purpose could be as in point 1. Or it may be malicious – to destroy your Google ranking.

    If this was a site I manage, I’d do a couple of things
    1. Disable all admin user accounts (except the primary site owner) until each one is cleared of suspicion.
    2. Check site for malware – at least run a full malware scan (there’s several suitable plugins incl WordFence and Get off Malicious Scripts) to make sure there’s nothing else suspicious hidden somewhere.
    3. chmod the .htaccess file to 444 (Read only) so it can’t be changed from the Yoast plugin “Edit Files” (or anyone else without changing back to 644)

    The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin definitely didn’t add it.

    Thread Starter sauerswald

    (@sauerswald)

    12 years, 8 months ago

    Thank you for the reply – I will for sure take these steps. Glad to know it wasn’t the plug-in.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

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