• Hi there,

    My site, IndieMuse.com, has been having some problems over the last several months, and I thought that I would include them all in the same thread, as they might be correlated. If anyone can help with this, I would be forever grateful.


    1) Google has stopped indexing our site

    IndieMuse used to do really well in Google. I think it has a pagerank of 4 (with a good amount of links coming in), and new posts would be added to Google within an hour of being published. They would often times end up on the first page of Google for searches. As of the last several months, our site has pretty much entirely been dropped from the search engine. I thought it might just be Google reorganizing, but it’s been like 4 months–too long for that to be the case. I have submitted the site index 3 times and it has not made a difference. I checked in WP preferences, and the site is still accepting search engine crawls.

    I don’t know if this is at all related, but for a few months, our RSS stopped working. The code below was somehow added to my index.php, and the RSS started working again once it was removed.

    <script>document.write(‘<div s’+’tyle=disp’+’lay:none>’);</
    script><a
    href=”http://uwmike.com/maps/phentermine.html”>phentermine</div>&#8221;

    2) The site has been running very slow.

    I use a cache plugin and it is enabled. I didn’t add any plugins from the time the site was working properly to now, though my WP has been upgraded. I spoke with my host (dreamhost), and it’s not an issue on their side.

    3) Blue boxes showing up on the site

    I have this new weird box popping up on the site (http://indiemuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/weirdbox.png) that links to “chrome://dictionarytip/skin/book.png.”

    I have no idea what that is, and tried to do some research, but didn’t find any answers. I looked through the template code and code for individual posts, and it doesn’t show up. The above screenshot is in Safari 3.2.1., and other visitors have seen it too.

    Those are more or less the problems I’m having. I’m not sure if this could be related to anything malicious, but I feel like if a spammer got into the site, it would be a lot more messed up than it currently is. I thought it was kinda strange, though, that out of everything that the search engines could be crawling, spam seems to have made it to the site description (http://indiemuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/yahooindiemuse.png) Something is definitely not right here. If you could offer any advice, I would really appreciate it. Thanks!

    Kind regards,
    David

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • David, some of your issues most definitely point to being hacked in some way. Particularly #1. And that is probably why Google has stopped indexing. Same thing happened to me.

    Immediately check all your directories for evidence of unusual files, particularly in the Uploads directory.

    As for the rest, not sure what to say.

    I just checked and Google has hundreds of your pages indexed, both new and old. Google did recently change some ways it rates links so that could have effected where you come up in searches.

    2) The site did not seem all that slow. There are a lot of graphics which is slowing it down. ANd those embedded Youtubes will slow down loading a lot. Reduce the number of posts on a page might help. The page size with images and associated files is over a MB.

    3) You have the dictionary Tooltip extension installed. You probably have Firefox but think it works with other browsers. Not a WP issue.

    Were you ever able to resolve issue #3? If so, how?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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