Has any one ever heard/seen this happen before? Black Hat SEO?

[Ryan_132]

I have never heard of anything like this happening before, but after we started to analyze a client's website (Very reputable, well known academic organization) We saw on the organic search terms report in analytics that people were getting to our site from some very lets say "dark" search terms lol. Everything from porn search terms to real cheap authentic beats by dre... stuff like that. Anyways, after typing in some of the search terms on google, no surprise their website was ranking for these terms on the first page of google! wtf????

The search result url has the clients website url www.example.com/EFG244G <- Followed by letters like that. Once we click on the search term it redirects us to a completely different website selling whatever...

Haha I am really interested by this, but it makes 0 sense to me. So are they somehow using our clients site because of the strong backlink profile to rank on the first page of google?

Update: For some of the search terms it redirects us to a completely different site, but then for other dark searches it takes us to our site, with a page not found error
Please help explain

Thanks.

 

[SEOPub]

Your client's site is hacked. That is how those pages are getting created. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of them on the site.

The hacker can easily redirect the traffic wherever they want once the hack is setup.

When you see those silly offers saying crap like "I'll send you 1000 targeted visitors per day for $100", this is how they do it.

You need to cleanup your client's site. You'll probably see their rankings drop or their site might even get deindexed once Google realizes it is hacked.

 

[Ryan_132]

Wow, I figured it had to be something like that.. the first thought I had was that there was someone in the organization doing this haha. I didn't know it could be that easy to hack a site like that. Now I wonder how long this has been going on for. Hopefully not too long.....

Thanks for the heads up. Much appreciated.