Am I Hacked or What?

Aug. 25 Internet Marketing no comments

What the hell, I thought I was hacked. I log in to my blog at 12 o clock in the morning and I see like 30 visits for today so far. That’s not normal… Got a bit freaked out. I was seeing the trend of less traffic to my blog, but this was just scary. Well, it’s weekend and I get less traffic on weekends but still.

And then I saw 14 broken links on my page. Those links were pointing back to my site. It was weird.

First thought in head. I got hacked!

Pulled of from the computer and went to the kitchen to eat pancakes, with strawberry jam. I was filling up my belly while thinking about my precious blog.

I remembered a product, a product to prevent your blog from getting hacked.

The sales letter was saying ” It isn’t a question will you get hacked, it’s the question when”

Yeah my when has come.

I sit down to the computer to look what could I do. I look at these 14 broken links and think how come they pointing back to pages on my blog and say not found, that could either mean they got deleted or hackers added links to non existing pages. I kept investigating those links and the thing is, I didn’t get hacked, the links are all my mistakes.

Yeah, I take the blame on me. Those were links that I haven’t checked when posting guest posts. All crazy kind of mistakes: a link in quotes, no http in front, etc. Shouldn’t have trusted those bloggers. I will check each and every link from now on, to prevent this.

I got all these links fixed, not all 14 were my mistakes, others were just broken links, kinda weird how many pages went down.

So okay, if I’m not hacked then why the hell today I got only like a third of the traffic that I usually get? I would like to believe that it’s because of the broken links, but that’s probably not the problem. The problem is way more complicated and it has something to do with penguins. Yes,yes, with those birds that can’t fly, but that’s a different story, I will talk about it in an upcoming blog post.

I use Broken Link Checker ( free WordPress plugin ) to check for errors in links. You should keep your links “clean” for SEO purposes and of course for better user experience.

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