Technical Difficulties, Part 2

Thanks to everyone for their patience. I had someone hack my site so that it was serving up ads for a particular kind of pharmaceutical in such a way that Google banned quite a few of the areas of my site. I’ve been cleaning things up, along with being busy on some side projects. I debated whether or not to post this information, but in the end I find it kind of interesting. Please note that this is not an invitation to anyone out there to do worse to my site. I am not a security expert. At the same time, in the very unlikely case the hacker is reading this, I’d like him or her to see the success they had with using my site for link juice.

Here are Google stats of two sample infected pages – these were two of the more popular pages on my site. You can see here that Google figured out that these pages were infected and de-listed them. You can see the day they turned off the tap. Since then it’s just been direct traffic.

Here are my stats for the entire site during the same period. This looks a little more dramatic than it is, because after the cleanup, I neglected to turn stat tracking back on for a couple of days. So on those days where they look close to zero, it really wasn’t that bad.

NOW BACK TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING

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