I’m tired. Didn’t sleep a wink last night. Spent the day just trying to do my part to make the world a better place. Drag my ass back to the hotel here, check email, and get this friendly notice from Google that jaycross.com has been hacked, so Google will kindly eliminate jaycross.com from search results for the next 30 days to “protect the quality of our search engine.” Thanks for the protection, guys!
I don’t know if this is a scam or not. It looks quite real. The advice page looks real enough. It suggests, “One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance.” Ha, ha. My host hasn’t responded to questions I asked more than a year ago.
I’ve deleted the directories Google specified. Google suggests I take the site offline until I fix the security hole. I haven’t decided what I am going to do next. I’m slow to anger, but if I could lay my hands on the jerks who are trying to trash my sites, I would gladly squeeze their throats until their eyes pop out and then to the same to their pets.
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Maybe this is a false alarm. The site jaycross.com contains a robots.txt file forbidding search engines from digging in. Something is off here.
Almost sounds like a scam — why would Google send you a personal email? For some reason I don’t see their bots as caring about the owners of web pages enough to send anyone an email.
What makes them think your site has been hacked? Do you see any evidence of hacking?
Donald, I had the same initial reaction. Then I found thousands of advertising pages lodged deep in subdirectories at jaycross.com (which is now bolted up tight.)
As Stephen Downes and I trudged across the icy cobblestones in Vaals, Netherlands, this morning (another story there), I was bitching about the need to keep up with so much junk just to post things without hassles. He does his own stuff; I have neither the desire nor technical chops to follow his lead. Stephen pointed out that these days you need to stay on top of a lot even if all you have is a WordPress blog.
Google just went up a couple of notches on my admiration list. At least they are warning people.
As to the spammers, don’t they already cause us enough problems? Now I’m wondering why they have to store stuff on other sites. . . are they trying to save storage and server fees?