Unhacking a Website Used for Black Hat SEO

Unhacking a Website Used for Black Hat SEO

I’ve just unhacked a website which was hacked for black hat SEO purposes. By black hat, I mean search engine optimization which uses less than savory tactics. Dishonest and illegal tactics. How exciting is that!

The hackers hacked into my client’s website to write very badly written blog posts on my unsuspecting client’s blog.

My client noticed the posts and called me, probably too late at night, probably while I was on vacation. “There are essay writing posts on my site,” he said. He owns a Calgary security company. “Did you put them there?” “Huh?” I said.

(By the way, his security company ranks in the top three on Google search results because of Ducktoes’s expert and legitimate SEO.)

These posts link back to their (the hackers) own client’s site, which in this case is an essay writing site. Oh, the irony, the irony! Badly written essays (posts) linking to essay writing site.

Did the hackers think we would not notice all these weird blog posts?  It doesn’t seem worth all the effort to break into a website, then write several posts, however badly written, only to have them immediately taken down. It must have taken hours to do all that work.  Wouldn’t their time be better served to do legitimate SEO, given the short shelf life of their bad SEO?

Here’s one of the wonderful posts. Click it to see it better.

Black-hat essay

 

Why might you ask, do hackers do black hat SEO? They do it as a supposed shortcut to real SEO, part of which is getting links to their clients’ sites.  Links can raise a site in Google search results.  For instance, if you were a student looking for an essay to hand in, you might search “essay company.”  An essay company that ranked high on Google would show up in your top search results.

So the hacker makes links in the blog posts, just for the links’ sake, so their client will get better search results. They break in and vandalize someone else’s site for this instead of writing real posts that people actually want to read.

By the way, these particular hackers injected code into the site to make a back door to gain entrance, so they could write the posts.

If your site gets hacked, by the way, for whatever nefarious purposes, we can un-hack it for you. We’ll clean up the hacker’s code and content, close any backdoors they’ve opened, and  make it more secure.

We can also do legitimate SEO for you to get your higher on Google and other search engines.

Here’s the link to our SEO page. We are a Calgary SEO agency.

Ciao for now.