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Yesterday, Google sent out about 20,000 warnings to webmasters that have had their sites compromised and may have no idea about it.
Matt Cutts tweeted they sent out these notifications of "your site might be hacked" for sites suffering from "weird redirects."
Recently, I have seen several sites reported to have weird redirects but the redirects are hard to track down. The hack is where the hacker gains access to your HTACCESS and only redirects users who click from Google to your web site. Otherwise, if they type in the domain name directly, there will be no redirect.
We've seen cases of sites getting labeled and even seen horrible cases of the canonical tag being used in hacks. Just be careful and check webmaster tools and secure your site.
Here is Matt's tweet:
Is your site doing weird redirects? We just sent a "your site might be hacked" msg to 20K sites, e.g. goo.gl/S6Ptk
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) April 16, 2012
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Comments:
Greg Fowler
04/26/2012 03:08 pm
Our site was hacked with the same redirect problem, and this is a serious problem, one other site of our was hacked the day before. I suggest to anyone now to take heed, if you are running wordpress, a forum, or been saving data in filezilla. This seems to be the way for the hackers to get in, but I am not sure. I wasn't worried about it happened to me, then your rankings fall because of it too.
Garrett Boon
05/14/2012 02:06 pm
My website had this hack. I noticed that about 1 week ago my traffic dropped. I thought it might be related to the Penguin update, but all my rankings were still in place. I saw the code in the .htaccess file, and removed it. There were two sets of code, one at the top of the file and one at the bottom. The code was hidden by placing it way over to the right of the file, where it wouldn't normally be seen. You had to scroll and find it. I run wordpress and use filezilla. I did not get any notifications from Google's WMT.
Nicole DeCell Kossum
03/14/2013 03:18 am
So I'm pretty sure this has happened to my site....any tips on how to fix it?