Attack on Site Update

[Tbird]

We have been under a Negative SEO Attack for at least six months.

Most of our traffic comes from Google Searches. This attack has caused our traffic to drop over 98% over the past six months. This is huge. It destroyed our traffic and advertising revenue. 

Our programmer feels he's got this fixed. It will take time to see if we can recover. We have paid for extra security to guard against hacking attempts which happen every couple of minutes currently.

First, let me tell you a bit about Negative SEO Attacks.

Negative SEO is any malicious practice aimed at sabotaging the search rankings of a competitor's website. This is generally considered "black hat SEO" for its malevolent nature.

The most common tactics associated with negative SEO.

1. Hacking a Website

This might be the most efficient yet costly tactic. As seen below, by hacking a website, an attacker can undermine a site's SEO performance however they wish. If it is the type of hack that results in a loss of search engine visibility, it can be deemed a negative SEO attack.

      We were hacked on the blog but not on the forum.

2. Creating Toxic Backlinks with Spammy Anchor Texts Pointing to the Website

Link farms, automated software, and PBNs (public blog networks) are widely used to generate these bad links. The number of links may vary - from a few hundred to thousands. 

     We have been added to thousands of spammy sites.

3. Scraping a Website's Content and Creating Duplicates of the Website

This practice is based on creating duplicates of websites or parts of their content, hotlinking, and spreading the fakes across the web. 

    We have been scraped, and our content is duplicated on many spammy sites

Why Did This Happen

Who can read the thoughts of miscreants? Not me.

I have come across a fair number of psychologically damaged people in my life. It does appear that the attack on the site was made by one of those types.

Remember that these psychologically impaired individuals tend to project their shortcomings on the object of their ire. 

This type of attack is designed to kill a site.

 

[Sgt. Wilky]

Will try to help as we can. I'm glad Hadit has been here for me, and I've been here since 2008. I'm very much ignorant of a lot of things, but this site and the people on here have helped me immensely. I hope people can and will give to help other vets find their way here.

Sgt. Wilky

[Tbird]

I am looking at making some hard decisions. 

[Lemuel]

I just searched hadit on bing.  No problem there.  But earlier this morning, I searched powerball and got everything but powerball.com.  It is ok now, because bing cleaned it up fairly quickly. 

I do not use google anymore because of too many searches that give you a page full of links labeled as what you are looking for but if you look carefully at the address when you run the cursor over the link it is nothing close.  Usually, it is another search engine trying to get a hit on their links but too often it is a link to a malware aimed at your computer.  The first "Ask" (a search engine) link I tried about five years ago got me a ransomware.  That was on google and I have not used google since.  I lost a lot of files and had to upgrade to Windows 8 from Windows 7 to wipe the hard drive and start over.

So, HADIT is getting too many searches.  That leads to the interference and the attacks.

[Tbird]

if you search for hadit yes we will come up. Problem is we use to come up for all kinds of va disability claims searches which gets you the most traffic.

If people never heard of you they aren't going to search for you.

So if you search for hadit.com we come up but if you search for "is my va rating protected" we use to come up on the first or second page. We don't anymore where before this page would come up https://www.hadit.com/is-my-va-rating-protected-after-10-20-years

[Lemuel]

I understand now.  Thanks for the clarification.