Quick comment for pixelrn

News from Google

I tried to leave a comment on pixelrn.com but the problem with talking about hacked sites is that you often end up using language that gets flagged as spammy. Here’s what I tried to say but the WordPress installation over on pixelrn wouldn’t let me:

Hi Beth, I checked and it doesn’t look like you have any spam-related penalties or anything like that. For a long time, something seemed wonky on your WordPress where http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:c_RD9jcaIRUJ:www.pixelrn.com/2007/08/10/us-nursing-schools-getting-you-down/+site:pixelrn.com&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=175&gl=us if you view the site showed “Nurse + Blog = PixelRN” as the title instead of the name of the post. In fact, a search like http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLD_en&q=site:pixelrn.com&start=170&sa=N shows some really weird title and snippet behavior.

Ah, this appears to be a problem too. Check out view-source on http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:c_RD9jcaIRUJ:www.pixelrn.com/2007/08/10/us-nursing-schools-getting-you-down/+site:pixelrn.com&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=175&gl=us and you can see that your site was hacked. View the source and see stuff like Byetta - Exenatide Injection at the bottom. So your site definitely appeared to be hacked, which caused Google to probably not rank your site highly.

We’ll keep thinking about ways to alert more sites that may have been hacked. The most recent blog post on the official Google webmaster blog gives some tips on self-diagnosing a hacked site, and the webmaster help discussion group might have been useful as well. Hope that helps!

www.mattcutts.com

published @ October 4, 2008