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Impact of malware on Google traffic

Some of you may have noticed that Blogstorm was subject to a malware hacking a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to everybody to contacted me to point the issue out – Google sent an automated email to alert me to the problem which is very proactive of them.

I’m just back from 2 weeks holiday so my involvement in fixing this was pretty much zero however it was a tough hack to track down and it took a few days to get the issue resolved.

As you can see from the chart below Google Organic traffic went from the average 1300/day mark down to around 10 visits per day. Pretty bad news when it happened for 5 days in a row.

Malware traffic

Getting malware is a nightmare, I have no idea how the average person without a team of developers would be able to fix things. We still don’t know what happened however it seems that the prototype.js file was the one modified.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 11:14am ON Monday, 20 September 2010

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

  • http://www.bravosmartwebdesign.com BravoSmart

    That’s actually pretty encouraging thought that your traffic seemed to bounce right back – at least it didn’t languish with low rankings for several months.

  • Alex

    Nice post, I like this graphic. It seems more and more frequent that Google’s searches turn up sites with malware.

    “Getting malware is a nightmare, I have no idea how the average person without a team of developers would be able to fix things.”

    As for this, there is a product called Cocoon that protects you from malware and increases your privacy while online. Cocoon uses a proxy to filter websites before you view them and stores all of your cookies and browsing history to your user account so no data ever touches your hard drive.

    Since Cocoon is currently in beta it’s free and available as Firefox add-on.

    Here’s a link to the Cocoon homepage:
    https://getcocoon.com/

    And here’s a link to a YouTube video that explains how the product works:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRM4aWiCwxk

    Have a nice day!
    Alex

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  • http://www.alexdumitru.com Alex Dumitru

    I have also had some trouble with malware on a few websites of mine and I wasn’t able to figure it out. All I could guess is that I’ve had the malware in my PC and it uploaded itself when I connected to the FTP server.

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