Gary Illyes, a former webmaster and SEO, converted Webmaster Trends Analyst working at Google Switzerland, posted on Google+ that he was sad after he tried to contact a webmaster whose site was hacked.
He said he spent an hour or so trying to reach out to this webmaster but the site was not verified within Google Webmaster Tools, there was no phone number or contact us form on the site. The one email address listed bounced back when tried.
Gary wrote:
Today I was trying to contact a pretty neat site. They are hacked and all their pages are redirecting to some random "buy vi4gr4 in a casino online" spam site.The site was not registered in Webmaster Tools. I could find one email address on the site which apparently was some PR person's. The email I sent there bounced. There was no contact form on the site. The WHOIS records were "protected". The email address in the SOA record also bounced.
After like 1 hour of hunting, I gave up. The owner of the site likely still doesn't know about the hack.
I'm sorry dude, we tried.
It is important I share this, it shows Google does try, even on a one-on-one basis to help webmasters. Although this approach doesn't scale, Google does employee a team of people whose job it is to do just that. We've talked about the challenges Gary goes through in his job before. But after writing about the unfair advantage big brands get with personalized Google support, I'd like to point out some of the smaller brands.
Forum discussion at Google+.
