Oh No! We have been delisted by Google!
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I'm a "programmer" at an e-commerce company. I also do some system administration when required, such as today since the main sysadmin had to get some dental work done.
Got a call today from a client saying that when you search for their company name they are no longer on Google, nor are many of the keywords they were ranking on the first page. They suggested one of their competitors hacked into either their webhosting account or Google account and they wanted FTP and other logs. They were still listed in Bing and their ads were still appearing on Google, just not in the organic search. I did check a few things and nothing looked out of place on our end. So I told them to log into their Google Webmaster account and see what was going on.
A little later they called back and said the GoogleBot was getting 403 errors. I was WTF? Then I checked the logs of the CDN that they use (via our whitelabelling). I saw lots of blocked attempts from various bots in the United States due to "Blocked Country". I remembered one of our other clients wanted to block the US due to them "stealing all his images" (or something: he only sells to Australia so I guess fair enough) but in the Settings there were no blocked countries. So I sent off a support request and followed it up with an emergency support phone call. The support couldn't do much but pass it on.
Then about 10 minutes later I got the sheepish phone call, but this time from the other guy.
"I uh, was getting too much bandwidth being used up by some Eastern European countries, so I blocked them. And, uh, America too. It's all a big fuck-up."
At least we now know what happens when you block that one particular country from accessing your website.
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Man this internet thing is great... but why does it have to be so connected and stuff?
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@dhromed said:
Man this internet thing is great... but why does it have to be so connected and stuff?
Though-- I recently dumped all the China, Russia and Korea IP blocks into my router's firewall. Bot attempts to access web vulnerabilities (ie: hundreds of variations of /phpMyAdmin and PUT /webdav/botnet.php attacks) dropped by orders of magnitude.
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@Lorne Kates said:
@dhromed said:
Man this internet thing is great... but why does it have to be so connected and stuff?
Though-- I recently dumped all the China, Russia and Korea IP blocks into my router's firewall. Bot attempts to access web vulnerabilities (ie: hundreds of variations of /phpMyAdmin and PUT /webdav/botnet.php attacks) dropped by orders of magnitude.
Did you try blocking internal IPs as well?
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@Ronald said:
Did you try blocking internal IPs as well?
Yes, but then I think some hacker crashed the router right after. I had to factory reset it to get access again. Then I melted all the equipment down to slag just in case there was something I missed.
