Google Sent 20,000+ Hacked Notification Messages To Webmasters Today

Apr 16, 2012 at 1:30pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google’s head of the webspam team, Matt Cutts, announced on Twitter that they have sent out new message notifications to 20,000 web sites that are hacked.

Specifically, Google sent these messages to sites doing “weird redirects.” I’ve personally seen a spike in the number of sites redirecting from their web site to a non-authorized site recently. The webmaster is typically unaware of this redirect because the redirects only occur when someone clicks from Google’s search results to the web site. Typically the site owner doesn’t go to Google to find his web site; the site owner goes directly to the site.

To help webmasters and site owners become aware of this hack, Google has sent out messages to about 20,000 sites effected by this to give them the heads up.

Here is Matt Cutts’ tweet:

Is your site doing weird redirects? We just sent a “your site might be hacked” msg to 20K sites, e.g. goo.gl/S6Ptk

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) April 16, 2012

For more on hacked sites and malware, see this Google document.

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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http://www.facebook.com/theandrewskelly Andrew Skelly

My sites were hacked a couple of weeks ago. Bluehost was useless in assisting so I found a guy on odesk to help. He cleaned up all 4 of my sites in 4 hours and get me back in business for less than it would cost for a dinner for 2 at Olive Garden.
http://www.jonrognerud.com/ Jon Rognerud

Hey Andrew, we got several sites hacked too – a combination of base64 (WordPress) and bad page redirects (classic viagra/cialis stuff) – 302 cloaking galore. Scary. We fixed it via robots exclusion and webmaster “remove urls” procedures (very quick by the way). We restored cleanly all the DB stuff and the themes and source. We do back those up regularly. oDesk rocks, I agree!
http://www.facebook.com/people/Thomas-Barrows/533045191 Thomas Barrows

Interesting – I just helped clean a site that also had an infection of its php files with base64 code spitting out nasty javascript redirects. This was also a WordPress site. Seems like this is the latest scourge.
http://profiles.google.com/juddexley Judd Exley

ALL of my WordPress sites were hacked, and some continue to be as my various webhosts have locked down access and whatnot (good of them).

I find it strangely curious that I’ve heard nothing from WordPress on the issue, but I continue to watch with anticipation to see A) who’s doing this bullsh*t and 2) what can be done about it other than the simple scripts that are already out there (just cleanups).
http://twitter.com/anjarsulistiyo Anjar Sulistiyo

these case ever come to me, my website redirect to russian website. but it can be remove with contact the hosting.
Rohini Kamboj

Dear All,

My Website also redirect when i open via search .. i have done all update and update wordpress blog also but still facing same problem …plz give some solution…

Rohini
Catalysts SEO

By this notification alerts from Google I could be able to find and clean up my website issues. Such a nice feature. I have also fixed up all the coding errors through this.

- – Search engine marketing – http://www.seocatalysts.com/
http://www.wageindicator.org fonstuinstra

We got such a Google-message last week for one of our wordpress websites (www.china-speakers-bureau.com; we hope to be in the air again later today). The redirects were odd: nothing happened at the website itself, but the redirects started when we linked to the site through social media – every one of them.
Cleaning up proved to be troublesome, and after two days the hacks were back again. We have now installed Sucuri, and keep our fingers crossed.
http://www.robertreeveslaw.com/locations/los-angeles-county/los-angeles-car-accident-lawyer.html Accident Lawyer

Thankfully haven’t been hacked, don’t know what I’d do if I did. Can’t access Gmail though.
http://www-buckfirelaw-com.myopenid.com/ Kathryn

Thankfully our site as not been hacked as well.
http://www-buckfirelaw-com.myopenid.com/ Daniel

WordPress is getting hacked by many of our fellow attorney friends. As of thus far, our WP blogs have not been.