A few days ago someone approached us with their SEO problem. They had a lot of web pages indexed by Google and were getting good results. However, their site’s pages indexed by Google was decreasing everyday and the ones which were indexed by Google, hadn’t been crawled in a few weeks. They had not made any change on the website and had all their internal and external links in place.
Initially we believed that they were under a penalty from Google as their Yahoo and Bing index had not changed much. We did a thorough inspection of the website but could not find anything they might have done to get a penalty. We checked their ip address and what else was hosted on the server. We also checked if someone had installed malware on the site or any kind of redirect. Everything came out clear, until we spotted a line in their .htaccess file. It was hidden in the file after multiple blank lines, so that it is not noticeable.
That line was redirecting (301) all the traffic coming to the website with user agent GoogleBot to a third-party spammy website. Somehow someone hacked the server and added changed the .htaccess file to gain all the rankings which our client had. This is something called Black Hat SEO and of course is illegal. We removed the code, provided the third-party domain name to our client and advised them to harden security on their servers. They regained most of the pages on Google within a week.
We advise all website owners to harden security on your servers and do not have server passwords as password.
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