I know some of you have been asking me why I haven’t updated my blog much in the last few weeks, so I figured it was time to get back on the horse.  Unfortunately right in the peak of my highest traffic month and best SERP rankings ever for this site, I was hacked and hit with a google penalty.

I suppose it’s not really that big of a deal as it didn’t affect my income, but I was pretty pissed and didn’t even want to come to the site anymore.  Nonetheless, life goes on and I’m sure as soon as all these shitty subdomains clear up in “G”, I’ll be back.

Here is what happened.  One afternoon I started getting hundreds of spam emails bouncing back from my own domain.  Immediately I thought this was pretty strange but I was hoping it was just someone using my domain in the sender field.  Not much you can do about this.

Well then I checked out my traffic on the sites hosted on this server, and they were all way down.  I already knew I was fuct somehow.  So upon further investigation I realized that someone had broken into the server and edited the DNS zone of every site to include the following wildcard:

From there they were able to set up hundreds of subdomains on this I.P. that all host malware.  You can see many of them here.

Google Results Page 2 For Jeremy Enke

Of course these fucking idiots at Hostgator take no responsibility whatsoever.  Maybe it is my fault, maybe not, but the DNS Zone was edited from the root account.  The good news is that none of the sites on this shared server are any of my money makers anyways, but it still just pisses me off.  I know the obvious question from the peanut gallery is “why the hell am I still with hostgator”.  A: I just host these smaller sites there and in all honesty I think it’s cause I’m too lazy to move them all.  I will probably re-think it now though.

Anyhow, there’s the explanation on why I have been slacking.  If anyone has any advice on how to get “un-fucked” from Google, feel free to share.  Or even feel free to share your opinion on how much of a dumb ass I am.

To make up for slacking, I will be posting over 30 posts in the next 30 days here.  Some will be business, some will be funny, and some might just be bizarre.  In the meantime, all I can offer however is sexy futbol fans.  enjoy.

I had a similar situation. A site of mine was penalized in Google thanks to some hackers sneaking in some viagra links. I fixed the problem and did a reinclusion from within webmaster tools explaining what had happened and everything was back to business as usual. Of course no help from the hosting company.

Seriously man, get off your ass and move your sites! Host Gator Obviously sucks.. Didn’t the owner of hostgator get on the PAP forum a while back??

i would start a new thread and ask him to explain why his hosting is so unsecure.

Yea Brett did join PAP. Thanks for the tough love though! I need to get off my ass and get them moved.

It’s good to see you back! Sorry to hear about the site getting hacked.

I did submit a re-inclusion letter today. Here was the content of it. Hopefully the man behind the curtain can empathize and feel my pain.

About 3 weeks ago, my website at www.jeremyenke.com was penalized in Google search results. This site is my personal blog and I make absolutely no income from it.

This has been my personal website since around October 2004 and I confirm that I haven’t done anything that may violate Google Webmaster Guidelines – there are no paid reviews, text ads, or links that have been paid for, etc.

I believe the penalty was imposed because my shared server at hostgator was hacked and the hacker added a * wildcard I.P. address to the domain. After doing this they then created several subdomains of which you can probably find in your index on that foreign I.P. address. The hackers I.P. address was 89.149.243.201. Although this was a security failure on the hosting companies fault, I am left to clean up the pieces. The wildcard was removed a week ago and any subdomains on this I.P. are no longer functioning.

I do not employ any black hat SEO techniques or use the service of any SEO company to boost the search rankings of my website in Google. I am simply just a blogger with several loyal readers. Nor do I buy or sell any links at www.jeremyenke.com

Because I follow all Webmaster guidelines and was the victim of hostgators server being hacked, I am requesting that my site be re-included in the google results I had before this took place. Should you require any additional information, please do let me know. Thanks so much for your understanding.

Jeremy Enke

You really do need to ditch hostgator, although all the reviews i’ve read seem to be positive about them.

Unless they hire people to write positive reviews????