Sunday July 12, 2009
Presumed Guilty: The Problem with Google Blacklist Removal (And The Solution)
Written by Raina Gustafson
Topics: google, hackers, malware, security
A screenshot no developer ever wants to see.
Are you here looking for help with your blacklist dilemma?
If so, I invite you to skip the article and request help here. If you’re a geek like me interested in all the juicy, glorious details, by all means read on.
Google Blacklist Removal: How We Got a Google Ban Lifted
It was definitely a Trojan Horse… and we were playing the part of ancient Greece. Excited and encouraged by recent business developments—reaping the benefit of referral relationships we’d cultivated—we were eager and willing to inherit a site created by two prior development teams. The client’s requests were straightforward, and fairly typical. They’d grown weary of working with developers far away, and wanted a local technical partner to take stock of the site’s gender-bending past (from Ruby to the PHP framework Symfony), fix a few bugs, and be ready to oversee a rebranding campaign when the time came.
Everything seemed fairly innocuous. Sure, it was a drag to sift through the vestigial Ruby code that previous developers had left in place, and the homepage redirect was seriously ill-advised, but nothing hinted of what was to come.
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