As some of you know I'm having a weekus horribilus which has been discussed on this thread.
I still don't actually know if the hack contributed to the high bandwidth usage, it may have been a coincidence that Big G removed all reference to our site exactly the same time. Probably not, it just made matters worse when as a poor layman, I hadn't a clue!
Possibly my experiences may serve as a lesson and help somebody else - this is what I have discovered, on a long & arduous journey:
My site is V7 Smart and I use text files to feed the sidebars. In the now hard-coded Section Links panel (top left) I switch Seasonal sections on and off by 'Hide on Website' and commenting out the links I don't want to show, e.g.:
then approaching Hallowe'en, I remove the comments and unhide the section. Halloween.html was one of the filenames affected.
Similarly, on the right hand side I have the second panel down, where I change the image and wording periodically - in case I want to reinstate something used previously, I <-- comment out --> the old and insert the new. These words and file name links could still be seen with [View Source] and would refer to hidden sections and old sections/pages since deleted. (Not there now, of course!)
It was the html files that had links inside the comments that had been hacked.
Where a Section is still 'live' and accessable from the sitemap, even if it was commented out of the Section list it wasn't - only those Sections that are either hidden or deleted were affected.
Of course I may be barking up the wrong tree! The first Errors Report from Google was nearly a thousand lines long and I've only found about twenty references in the acatalog folder.
However a huge number of these spurious filenames purported to be in the COM folder, I can't see them there now with ftp or Plesk - but then, I have had a 'Purge & Refresh', and migrated to a different host server.
My conclusion thus far is that something is finding these once legitimate filenames, now defunct, and re-using them with dodgy Page Titles, which were what G spotted; and all the links gave 404 errors anyway, as of course the page didn't actually exist.
Presumably, as these links are in a text file, they are not 'purged & refreshed' - so the lesson must be, don't comment out old file names in text files.
.
I still don't actually know if the hack contributed to the high bandwidth usage, it may have been a coincidence that Big G removed all reference to our site exactly the same time. Probably not, it just made matters worse when as a poor layman, I hadn't a clue!
Possibly my experiences may serve as a lesson and help somebody else - this is what I have discovered, on a long & arduous journey:
My site is V7 Smart and I use text files to feed the sidebars. In the now hard-coded Section Links panel (top left) I switch Seasonal sections on and off by 'Hide on Website' and commenting out the links I don't want to show, e.g.:
Code:
<-- <A HREF="acatalog/Halloween.html">Hallowe'en</A> -->
Similarly, on the right hand side I have the second panel down, where I change the image and wording periodically - in case I want to reinstate something used previously, I <-- comment out --> the old and insert the new. These words and file name links could still be seen with [View Source] and would refer to hidden sections and old sections/pages since deleted. (Not there now, of course!)
It was the html files that had links inside the comments that had been hacked.
Where a Section is still 'live' and accessable from the sitemap, even if it was commented out of the Section list it wasn't - only those Sections that are either hidden or deleted were affected.
Of course I may be barking up the wrong tree! The first Errors Report from Google was nearly a thousand lines long and I've only found about twenty references in the acatalog folder.
However a huge number of these spurious filenames purported to be in the COM folder, I can't see them there now with ftp or Plesk - but then, I have had a 'Purge & Refresh', and migrated to a different host server.
My conclusion thus far is that something is finding these once legitimate filenames, now defunct, and re-using them with dodgy Page Titles, which were what G spotted; and all the links gave 404 errors anyway, as of course the page didn't actually exist.
Presumably, as these links are in a text file, they are not 'purged & refreshed' - so the lesson must be, don't comment out old file names in text files.
.
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