How I fixed a Google disaster

It’s an online retailer’s worst nightmare – when your site goes down and Google blocks you from their search results. It happened to Paul Greenberg of online department store DealsDirect last week, when he found users were unable to access the site and were given a malware warning.

He says he was able to fix the problem and get his site back online by having a responsive technical team and the ability to communicate to customers through social media.

How did you come to know about the problem?

I was moving house at the time, and the first call I got about it was very early in the morning. It goes without saying that our customers were the first people to tell us, we rely on them to do that because they really reflect the mood of your business. The first notification was around 6am via a handful of customers on the live chat support service.

The way we have that set up is we have a team of about 10 people who receive security alerts or emails at about the same time if something happens. They are all experienced with their technology and got straight into it, and within 20 or so minutes we had figured out the problem and had actually fixed it.

What was your first reaction?

We shut it down immediately. The guys worked out in minutes how to shut it down, but of course we know in that period people were accessing the site. The majority would not have seen a difference, but they were affected, and Google did the right thing here in putting up a warning. The problem wasn’t the 15 minutes of the ads, it was the Google message.

So the initial problem was gone, but people were still getting a warning.

That was the challenge. They said you have a problem, we spend $100,000 or more a month on AdWords and are a big Google customer. We got on to our contacts, but the unblocking of the site takes place in Switzerland and we just had to hang in there until about lunch time until someone came online and could fix everything up. That was what was frustrating, because it’s such an ugly notice to see!

The actual ordeal lasted 15 minutes, but of course until that notice goes away we had our marketing time ready to field a number of calls.

What was the key factor here in getting the problem solved as quickly as possible?

Having that security team in place. We have invested a lot of time and resources into experience, and security is on top of the list. Our systems really worked the way they were supposed to.

Even though the problem was gone, the publicity was out there. How did you manage that and let everything know the site was okay?

We were concerned with some of the press that came around, and if you went to SMH.com.au there was a story that hung around for the weekend four days running.

But what we did was identified where there was activity about us, and then moved into a reputation management mode. We were busy with our customer service team letting people know what had happened, and we had some reputation management experts responding and addressing some of the concerns.

Some places would include forums like Whirlpool, the SMH site where the piece was written, some other online areas and in social media. We had a good idea from our web stats who had come into the site and would have seen that warning, so we just worked to set the record straight.

I’m not saying social media is always our strongest form of marketing, but we identified that we had to communicate with customers directly in this instance to let them know what had happened.

What advice would you give to SMEs who are dealing with a major SEO problem, like a blacklisting?

I would give the same advice we followed – be vigilant. Of course prevention is far better than a cure, but accept that things are going to go wrong. So have the processes in place so you can shut things down quickly.

We have learned a lot from this incident, we won’t be using that ad server any more. But be prepared to learn, have a very clear evacuation procedure in place. Don’t panic, just make sure everyone knows what they are doing and get to it. Communicate with your stakeholders, key suppliers, bankers, etc. Everyone was supportive of us, and that’s because we did the right thing.