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How to Overwrite Your Blog In 1 Easy Step

Posted by How To Blog

Last week I noticed that the search traffic to one of my niche sites had dropped off considerably.  As in, I’m now getting less than half of the normal traffic.  So I started poking around my Wordpress files to see if I could identify the culprit.

What I found was that when I selected View, Source in IE 7 the bottom of the page was showing <strong>500-600 spam links</strong>.  Imagine hundreds upon hundreds of porn-related anchor text!  No wonder my site had been slapped by G.  The links weren’t visible to the naked eye but were definitely present in the HTML source code for EVERY PAGE ON MY SITE.

I submitted some inquiries at forums to no avail – no one could figure out how the links had been placed there.  I then ran a few Google searches and came upon a similar problem that someone had reported with their Movable Type blog.  Apparently their site had been spammed because of a plugin they’d activated that contained malicious code.  Hmmn.

A check of my plugins showed that one of them had a modification date of 3/22/09, the day BEFORE my site took a nose dive.   Since I haven’t added or modified any plugins in several weeks I quickly disabled and deleted it.  However, I still had to find out how to get rid of those spam links.

A check of the Wordpress files at my site showed that footer.php had been modified on 3/22/09.  Coincidence?  Hell no.  I haven’t modified the footer in months.

Sure enough, when I opened that file I found the source of the spammy links.  They were all listed at the bottom of footer.php.  Guys, you just don’t know how angry I was when I saw those porn links.  I’ve deleted them and I’m monitoring the site, but this really pisses me off.  My footer.php file was 6,000 times larger than normal.

Here’s the worst part of this story.  Because of this problem I decided to manually upgrade the site to Wordpress 2.7, which is supposed to be more secure than earlier versions.  I made a mistake and ended up OVERWRITING A DIFFERENT NICHE  SITE!  Yes, I overwrote the entire site because I highlighted the wrong domain in FileZilla.  I called BlueHost and the nice man from India told me that I was screwed (my words not his).  BlueHost doesn’t keep backups.  I have a backup SQL file but I’m clueless as to where to copy it.  And I’m gun shy now that I messed up the site.  I’ve submitted a ticket with BlueHost about this.

I went to the Google cache and was able to copy and paste several of my posts into Notepad but then Google decided that I was a spam robot and cut me off.

So, in a nutshell, TODAY HAS SUCKED.  I think I need to go to church . . .