Lessons learnt after hackers pulled our gaming site off Google

Since the end of 2015, I’ve been dragged knee-deep into a horrible swamp with technical SEO issues and hackers targeting us, the casual gaming industry, and Google search results in general. For the full backstory, I recommend you read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 over at Medium.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

I come from an entirely non-technical background. In fact, I have a degree in arts. Everything I know about SEO was picked up along the way, by studying material online and trial and error tests.

When you combine your SEO efforts with Google Analytics, you should be able to figure out what works and what does not. This “A/B” testing is critical if you want to make sure you are going in the right direction.

I joined Gametop in mid 2015, just when the company relocated to Singapore, and have been with them ever since. We are not exactly a startup, and are around 13 years old now. But since our operations are very lean, we work very much like a startup.

Most new companies struggle to get some love from Google. In fact, a new website could take around six months to be properly indexed by the search giant. Things work very much like how you would expect them to work offline. Companies and websites that have been around for a long time are generally more reputable and trustworthy than newcomers. The same is true when it comes to traffic from search engines. Older companies usually have more mentions, their brand is more established, and they obviously already have a history with a long list of (hopefully satisfied) customers.

For a startup, the only way to create significant traffic might just be paying for it. This could be through the traditional search marketing (Google, Bing, etc.) or through social media channels. But at the end of the day, organic search traffic is what you want, simply because it better matches the intention of your user. This is usually translated into a high rate of conversions, longer time on site and all that good stuff.

The deal with hackers

Gametop enjoys a good amount of search engine traffic from people who are searching for something related to casual gaming. This makes sense, because the website and service is very simple and fulfils the intention of the user without many obstacles. In fact, all the games we provide are available free of charge, no strings attached.

In early December, we noticed something funny that was happening with our site traffic. By funny, I mean something unusual, and not in a positive way. Some of our pages seemed to have disappeared from Google’s index. In other words, the pages did not appear on search results at all.

Pro tip 1

Set up a separate report on your analytics that shows only your organic traffic. Certain pages suddenly went down and there was no clear explanation why this happened.

Pro tip 2

Add more dimensions to your organic traffic report to dissect the traffic further (source/medium,device category, country etc. what makes sense for you).

Some of our pages lost 80-90% of their traffic. As we are in the online advertising business, the impact was immediate. The graph below shows how the “all downloadable games” page went down in a matter of days.

Lessons learnt