My domain invaded?

I went thru my web stats the other day and found to my dismay that I have been invaded by porno websites. I've had my domain name for a bit over 10 years and have never had such a problem.

I emailed my host and requested that they remove the hundreds of links that the sites left.

The response I got was; We can not delete the data or block it. Sorry.

I have 5 other domains on this server and they are clean. That part doesn't make any sense either.

At any rate. My main domain, which had some value, is now useless. I did create a redirect page to send anything that comes my way off to a no-where place. Maybe that will help.

I don't think that any visitor wants to be exposed to that junk.

Any ideas?

RT...

if your web hosts best response is 'We can not delete the data or block it. Sorry' get out of there, fast!

I'm sorry to hear your site (effectively) got hacked. Your hosts (or you) need to change all the passwords now, tighten up their security and remove that code, I don't understand why they couldn't spimply remove it.

Visitors and the search engines will certainly not want to see things like that, are you redirecting your whole site elsewhere? coz that will harm you a lot, is there any way you could robots.txt out the page with links on, redirect that page to nowhere or anything similar?

I hope you can recover quickly

I don't understand, why can't you delete your site from the server and restore from a backup made prior to the attack.

you should be able to block them through the control panel yourself if the host doesn't do that then they are a bad host and you should switch hosts

Some times hosts can do little in helping a client's site from getting "hacked". You know there are thousands of sites still running "antiquated" software - eg; Wordpress - the most famous blogging software. Old versions of WP had a security issue which can be exploited by any malicious entity to add piles of hidden links and the unsuspecting webmasters will never know. How many people have upgraded their WP installations ?

The host can do precious little if the client doesn't take steps to upgrade the scripts or other user installed software.

In this case, you can still retain the value of your domain/site.

1. Add a new index.htm[l] or whatever your default page detailing that the site is undergoing routine maintenance.

2. Restore the site's content from a known good backup.

3. Change all passwords/access details.

4. If you have the inhouse skills, dig out the raw server log files for the way the scum entered. A post postmortem always is essential for collecting valuable data.

5. Check if any damage has been done in the search engine side. Many sites who were hacked earlier would have been designated "This Site will harm your computer " or other unsavory epithets in SERP. Most of the time , you would have just lost the rankings due to linking to bad neighborhood.
This takes ages to recover. You can ask for re inclusion, stating what you had done till now and what steps you would take to avoid the same scenario.

It takes time and effort to regain the lost trust. But it is doable.