Are we too cynical? What I learnt from offering 60 hacked sites free help

How it all started

This all started after being asked to look into why a site had experienced a big drop in search engine rankings. Typically a client will approach me with a drop off in rankings and traffic, and it will often turn out to be a site migration gone wrong. 

Not so in this case. Their site had been hacked!

They had a page looking a lot like this:

The page was a plain html page with generated content around Michael Kors Shoes.

That page had lots of nasty links pointing at it that looked a bit like this (I’m not going to put a screenshot up of the actual links that my client or the other sites had pointing at them):

I won’t go into the full details of how I helped the client clean up their site in Google, and patched it up, as that’s not the point of this article….

Doing a good turn, and saving a few businesses!

Image Credit: Max Pixel

In helping the client I’d noticed links going off to all sorts of other different sites, from local plumbers, to ecommerce sites, and charities too.

A lot of these are not going to have expertise in house to spot, let alone fix the problem. Leaving the problem there could kill off a lot of their web business.

I decided to spend an hour on a Friday afternoon messaging a few business to let them know about the problem.

As well as highlighting the problem I thought I’d give them a few bullet point notes on how to fix the problem themselves, or get their web designers/developers to help them with.

The email template I used was this:

Hi there,

I’m currently helping a client whose website has been hacked, and spotted yours has too unfortunately. 

I thought you should be given a heads up that there is a page called https://www.examplesite.co.uk/examplesite.html now showing for your site that talks about Michael Kors Shoes.

Aware you might not know what to do next, so here’s what you can do to fix it:

1. Talk to your web designers/developers – make sure they are aware and can put security measures in place to stop it happening again

2. Remove the page from your site – literally just delete the page or get your web developers to do it. Once done when you visit the page you should get a page not found message.

3. Remove the page from Google – use the ‘remove URLs’ function in Google Search Console to remove the page. It could take a day or 2, and you can confirm its removed by doing a search in Google of site:www.examplesite.co.uk, and the page should no longer be visible.

4. Clean up the bad links – you’ll need to look up how to disavow your links through Google Search Console, and tell Google those links are nothing to do with your site.

Hope that helps, and sorry to be the bearer of bad news before the bank holiday weekend!

Thanks

James

60 sites contacted – how many thank you’s?

Image Credit: Jez Arnold

I ended up contacting 60 sites in total, all UK based. Being a Friday afternoon before the bank holiday weekend I wasn’t expecting much of a response that same day.

In fact I only ended up hearing back from 3 businesses in the 2 weeks since then.

1 was a web designer 

1 was a coder

1 was a director of a very big chain of companies (turned out the little site was one of theirs, not a small independent).

All 3 responders were very tech savvy people, very capable of fixing the problem themselves, and very thankful I had taken the time to point it out.

So 5% of those I contacted bothered to thank me for pointing out a big problem that could really impact their business….

Why so few thank you’s – are we too cynical about offers of free help?

I started off thinking “how can people be so ungrateful for me taking the time to help them?”. 

The more I thought about it though, the more I realised we get so many phishing emails coming through that look so genuine, its becoming hard to know who to trust.

People also tend to be suspicious of people they don’t know helping them. 

Everyone’s selfish right? 

Why would they do something nice – what’s in it for them?

The 3 respondents were all tech savvy people, capable of realising the email was genuine. For those businesses who were less tech savvy, and ironically the very people I was trying to help, my email must have seemed like a potential scam, and was no doubt deleted without a thought.

Which got me thinking in a wider perspective. Do I miss opportunities in life now after being conditioned to be cynical?

In being too cynical, do we miss out on genuine help being offered in our everyday lives much like these businesses did with their hacked websites?

Hi I’m James! I’m a freelance digital marketing consultant with over 11 years experience. I’ve worked in agencies, in-house, and I’m now a freelancer. I am also an Associate at The Hoxby Collective – a community of over 200 freelancers that believes that flexible working is the future of the global workforce. View my profile to find out more about me, or to see my contact details.