Delisting 101: Bad Webhosting Can Even Get You Banished From Google

You thought cheap webhosting was a bargain. Maybe … but bad webhosting isn't just a bummer — it can get you delisted, added to badware lists, etc.

And it doesn't have to be your fault (directly, anyway).

Use IX Web Hosting | ixwebhosting.com web hosting at your own risk. One day you might just get hacked and/or defaced. Even worse, you might be — courtesy of some Turkish hacker — installing malware on users' computers by proxy. The hackers seem to be pretty good, if a little mean. Fix it, and then it just might happen the next day anyway. That seems to be the story reported everywhere.

A few associates of mine have — they got hacked … and finally delisted.

Now that's OK. People get hacked all the time because of their own incompetence. But at least one of them that I know has a totally static web site. That leaves brute force and/or password sniffing cleartext passwords. Both are unlikely en masse.

So it's that, or your web host *itself* is hacked!

A possibility. I found this all suspicious. I Googled it. What I found is absolutely appalling —

Hundreds and hundreds of hacked domains, with a similar vector.

Some of these people are upgrading often and responsibly, using custom applications, etc.

The same vector simply can't apply to everyone's web sites. They're running various applications with various flaws. So that's unrealistic. Some had weak passwords, I'm sure — but so many? Hence, it's more likely that it's an underlying problem with the web server. IX continues to tell everyone to use stronger passwords, upgrade their anti-virus software (¿que?), and be more careful. As if key-loggers are that common? Um no.

Maybe they should take their own advice and tighten up their own boxes before blaming the user. The users are reportedly get hacked over and over — and over. Scary. So all of them have the same flawed anti-virus application, and use weak passwords? No. Probably not.

If your web host gets hacked, you're at their mercy. So they'd better know a thing or two about security. But you paid $2.99 per month, did you? Bad move. That was your mistake.

Several References:
http://ixwebhostwarning.wordpress.com/
http://forums.applenova.com/showthread.php?t=18025
http://www.vistainter.com/reviews/I/ixwebhosting.com/
http://kuscsik.blogspot.com/2008/01/ix-webhosting-default-backdoor.html
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?s=01a9f3f779beec5274cdc25a9856c8e0&p=5396336&postcount=13
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=5403583#post5403583
http://hostjury.com/reviews/IX-web-hosting
http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?p=1422266&sid=72538fc95043a14ad091c82e0f161195#p1422266

Find more:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ixwebhosting+hacked&btnG=Search

The worst part is, when you get hacked courtesy of their lackadaisical security, they throw up a monetization page while you're down. So they're profiting while you're getting delisted and Google thinks you're either dead, hacked, or someone snapped up your domain to monetize old links and random traffic. Awesome IX … awesome.

That's some pretty lousy SEO. Cheap web hosting can really be the end. Google might notice of course, and give this lot (of presumably similar IPs) a second gander. But what if they don't?

So bad web hosting can't just lead to downtime. It can lead to permanent exile from Google, and getting on the spyware/badware bad-list for a long, long time. And then R.I.P. everything. Kiss it all goodbye … all thanks to $2.99 hosting.

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Non-Obvious Things eCommerce Can Do When Rankings Implode

Your friendly Captain-obvious-inspired search marketer might argue you shouldn't have done so when you depended on your organic rankings so much — but they're almost certainly vulnerable too. Let's face it. It's just plain difficult to get natural referral traffic when you're ultimately just another guy selling commodities. OK, so don't be just another guy selli … nevermind. They're hypocrites. So what can you do?

1. Move Goods On eBay With Help Of Automation

eBay, except for some upfront infrastructure costs and smaller up-front listing costs, is pay-per-conversion. That should make you salivate. Unfortunately, it's generally a total pain to sell on eBay. Automation with their API can streamline it substantially. We offer our eBay integration module as an option for our eCommerce customers. The module lists items from their product database with a few clicks, and it can auto-relist as well. It's certainly a bear to set up, but once it's running, it's as beautiful as Captain Obvious herself. You can save time (and money — Captain Obvious speaking again) by automating monotonous work.

Templatized listings improve your image and make your manually-listing competitors look amateur. Lastly, it can help by generating more volume even if margins are tighter.eBay used to be a place where you sold the baseball cards in your attic. It's now basically just another venue to sell — whether it be baseball cards or your particular commodities. If you're not selling on eBay, you're not exploiting a potentially very profitable venue with a quasi-pay-per-performance cost schedule.

2. Shopping Feeds + ROI Tracking

Google Shopping is 100% free. So if you're not doing that, start there. Then move to the non-free feeds. You can target only those products that seem to convert or for which you have some sort of deal. Make sure your categorization is correct, as this can make a difference. Our shopping feed module maps product categories to feed categories automatically based on some configuration settings. It also lets you exclude certain listings for paid feeds that aren't profitable. Then you can integrate with Google Analytics and optimize from there. We find this to be easier and less risky than dealing with PPC.

3. Wait Patiently; Improve Site For People

It's not so obvious that this is the best time for usability experiments, but it might be. Ultimately it's people who convert, not search engines — and there's always room to improve your checkout page. We often suggest redesigns, reskins, and improvements when rankings fall. It's not necessarily the obvious time you think to do it, but it's frequently the best time to make changes that you'd otherwise hesitate to do.

For example, here's a new checkout mockup we're prototyping —

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