Geeklog Forums

Hi,

I just noticed my site was not showing up hits in google for searches that I thought it should, and when I did belatedly get a hit google said something about "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt"

I dug around and found that my robots.txt file said:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Disallow: /docs
Disallow: /pingback.php
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /submit.php
Disallow: /trackback.php
Disallow: /usersettings.php

Am I correct in assuming the first line was blocking my entire site!? I checked old backups and it looks like it was ok in 2014 and as above some time in 2015.

And if so I'm thinking it must either be a hack (unless my host stuffed it up unwittingly)?

Thanks for any insight. I've just removed line 2 and submitted it to google.

My hits are up and we're back appearing in google news items since I removed the offending line.

I'm guessing my site was hacked in a subtle way such that it hurt us but wasn't obvious.

Yeah line 2 would remove you from the search results. If you didn't do it by accident then your hosting account or site might have been hacked. What version of Geeklog are you using? You should be using the latest version if possible.

I would double check your site for any extra files the hackers may have added. They could use them to regain access to your site. One way to do this is to check for any newer files as most hackers when they create a file do not change the date of them to something older.

---

One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

Yeah I'm sure it wasn't me, I barely knew the file existed. The only others that knew the site password were 2 writers who know nothing of coding and are still happy contributors, I guess the site host might, and possibly a geeklog contributor that helped with an upgrade once (and I wouldn't suspect them - they helped me, I paid them, so no issues). So a hacking looks likely.

Sadly I'm still at 1.8.2. As I've mentioned on here before, I'm extremely time poor, fortunately other writers still keep the content ticking over but I do very little other than try to resolve occasional issues. And we've got quite a few customisations so it isn't trivial just to pay someone a token amount for a few hours work to update us. I'll try to upgrade in the next few months if I can organise a day off work.

Not sure how to find more recent files. I don't have access to run linux commands or anything on the site, I just interact with filezilla and cpanel. So there could be rogue files hidden anywhere in there. Maybe I can do a backup and unzip/untar it to my laptop and search that way. I reckon it happened between 1 and 2 years ago. Last I checked we do get a lot of hits from Russia and given Australian Rules football is barely known there I figure most of them are malicious.

Thanks.