Last December, someone hacked our website, maliciously sending all of our traffic to other domains. Unfortunately, Google flags this kind of activity as spam and immediately stopped sending traffic to our site. For 10 days, we weren't able to receive any traffic from Google or any other of the major search engines.
What happens when you're invisible online? Panic happens. We went from receiving around 600 visitors via Google a day to literally zero. The worst thing for us was all the customer leads we lost -- 30 in total. We lost another three potential clients, two of which visited our site, saw an error message, and figured we weren't the company for them. And another who was trying to contact us through our website and gave up. After cleaning up our system, we lost 20 percent of our annual revenue and had to invest about $8,000 in new security measures. Nowadays, if our site goes down for more than 60 seconds, we receive an automatic email alert.
These small businesses were hit by a number of different scams. Here's what they had to say about their experiences.
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