Do Not Rely On Google Traffic! Do Not Rely On Google Traffic! Do Not Rely On Google Traffic!

HACKED! “hello from norwegian teen hackers, we’ve hacked your blog. Long Live norwegian teen hackers! (insert stupid skull picture here)

Stupid hackers announce to the world they hacked you.

When you see most sites hacked it’s done by complete amateurs who are just looking for some attention. No biggie for you because you backup your files, YOU ARE SAFE, correct? Probably.

If you do get hacked by somebody that is looking for attention consider yourself lucky. There are many hackers that won’t let themselves known as easy and have much darker desires than announcing to the world “I hacked abcdefg.com”.

How One Line Of Code Can Destroy Your Online Business

Do Not Rely On Google Traffic! Do Not Rely On Google Traffic! Do Not Rely On Google Traffic!

A pro hacker WILL NOT let you know they hacked you. They will compromise EVERY site on your server and you will not know it.

This happened to me a few days ago. A hacker added one single line of code to the bottom of every index.php page I had sitting on a server, roughly 60 websites. (not the 45n5 server)

The code was javascript that appeared to collect user stats however to the googlebot and some systems they viewed it as a VIRUS. Ouch.

What Happens When A Googlebot Thinks There Is A Virus Or Malicious Javascript On Your Site?

IMMEDIATELY they drop the site to Pagerank 0 and add the lovely disclaimer to every single search result “This site may harm your computer.” PLUS stop sending you ANY traffic.

They WILL NOT ask your opinion on the matter. They will just KILL your sites.

Fortunately I spent the entire day fixing the sites and only a handful of sites dropped to PR0 however a couple averaged over 1000 uniques per day and were a couple years old so i took some decent loses.

If you DEPEND on google traffic they can shut it off in an INSTANT! And you will never see it coming. All from one line of code. It might not happen to most of you but if it happened to me it CAN HAPPEN TO YOU.

I really like google though

I love google search, I love they are slapping webmasters, I love google products, I think pagerank is becoming even more relevant (to everybody except the people getting slapped ;).

HOWEVER I would NOT build a business that depends on google traffic to feed your family. I really hope this story drives the point home for you.

But I’m OK

Fortunately not all of my sites were killed. I can still eat. Plus I’m very optimistic about moving towards 100% income not attached to the googlebot for 2008 now.

I know many of you will blow this off and that’s cool, I will have some products to sell you in 2008 (more on that later) however for the 4 people that REALLY pay attention here, run away from any income dependent on google as fast as you can, seriously, start running, otherwise:

One Line Of Code Can Destroy Your Online Business

(ps. My best guess is dreamhost servers were compromised and not my sites directly. They said this was a possibility however we’re not sure the exact problem. I also removed EVERY single wordpress install I could find from anytime, even if the site was making a small amount each month, wordpress is a LIABILITY to your business unless you can update every single install every single month.)