Flashes of Panic

Remember how I was complaining about all the ringtone spam which appeared to be pointed at this site, apparently causing me to drop in the search rankings? I was puzzled, at the time, by the inbound links; why would anyone link to this domain for spammy content which wasn’t here?

This afternoon, while I was backing up the site in preparation for a server move, I found four different locations on the site where loads of files had been hidden, most of them set up to look like a big blog about… ringtones. Or some other thing people spam for a lot. The files were mostly datestamped around January or February of this year. Some of them were hidden in directories named with a leading dot, which made them invisible in listings unless they were specifically requested; others were simply stuffed in with valid files. It looks like there was something to that ringtone stuff after all.

It could’ve been a lot worse; because of the placement of most of the files, they were not listed in my XML sitemap, nor were they in frequently-updated directories.

I’ve deleted the files, and as I was moving the site anyway, most of the passwords will become invalid soon. I simply accelerated my move process. But it’s not at all clear to me how the files got there.

Or, for that matter, if I’ll be able to convince Google that I’m not a spammer. Any more, anyway.