Yesterday I set about an SEO task for one of my clients. The first port of call was Webmaster Tools to check out the keywords, impressions and clickthroughs. Whilst looking at this page I noticed a number of ‘explicit’ keywords that weren’t in the campaign. Suspicion promptly set in and I visited the clients site – where all looked to be in order.
However, on closer inspection (I viewed the page source) I noticed that there was a list of a couple of hundred links to adult web sites, where there was a heavy weighting of explicit phrases. All this sat below the </html> tag on the page.
So… bottom line is their 3rd party CMS has been breached and I promptly alerted them about this.
However, more concerning is why Google is giving value to content NOT visible on the web page. This breach has put a huge dent in their SEO campaign, and I imagine that the developer of their CMS needs to be held accountable for this, however I am dissapointed that Google has given significant value to content that is hidden on the page (i.e not visible to the user).
I have had issues with CMS driven sites in the past where the developer has shown no intuition towards SEO, but this is a serious matter on two fronts and quite frankly I feel let down by both Google and the 3rd party developer. It means our efforts for the last 6 months could have been wasted unless we can find a very quick solution!
Update : After doing some more research on this problem I have found that it was actually a hosting company issue, and a breach of security that has meant that the .htaccess file was modified. Now, Google has dumped my clients site out of the listings for what looks like an overwhelming revision of keywords on the ‘page’. I have suggested to my client that they seek damages for the costs of the last six months SEO that have gone from very promising last month, to none existant this month.
The hosting company by the way…. Media Temple
