Hacked in his busiest season, and back by summer.

Spring is the whole year.

For a junk removal company, spring is not a nice bump. Tax refunds land, the weather turns, and half the Willamette Valley decides the garage is finally getting cleaned out. Eddie Zinda had built EZ Junk & Hauling around that rhythm: same day pickup, fair pricing, a family that shows up at your door instead of a national franchise.

He was doing the responsible thing about marketing, too. He had hired a large SEO agency out of Portland and was paying $2,500 a month for it. On paper the work looked fine. Content was going up. Reports arrived. Nothing was obviously wrong.

The rankings just sat there. Month after month, flat, through the one stretch of the calendar he could not afford to be flat in.

Half his ranked pages went to a slot machine.

Our audit runs a security pass before it touches keywords, because a compromised site makes every other number meaningless. That pass flagged it on day one.

Roughly half of the pages Google had indexed for EZ Junk & Hauling were serving an injected redirect. A real person searching for appliance removal in Salem could land on the right page. A crawler, or a visitor arriving from the wrong place, got pushed to an online gambling site instead.

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  Injected redirects on indexed pagesAbout half the site's ranking URLs were sending traffic somewhere Eddie had never heard of.
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  Conditional cloakingThe redirect did not fire for everyone, which is exactly why nobody spotted it from the dashboard. The site looked fine if you simply visited it.
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  Rankings bleeding out quietlyGoogle does not announce this. It just stops trusting the pages, and the decline reads like an ordinary slump.
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  An SEO budget going into a leaking bucket$2,500 a month of content and link work, landing on pages search engines were losing confidence in.

Secure it first. Then rebuild it.

• 1
  Cleaned the infection and closed the doorMalware removed, injected redirects stripped out, and the loose end that let it in shut behind us. Cleaning without finding the entry point just buys a few weeks.
• 2
  Rebuilt the architectureService pages and service area pages restructured so every real page had one clear job, and internal links pointed at the pages that actually earn calls.
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  Re-earned the crawlClean sitemap, correct canonicals, schema, and a re-indexing push so Google would come back and look at a site that was finally telling the truth.
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  Went after the local mapGoogle Business Profile, the Salem and Keizer service area coverage, and the service pages that match how people actually search when a couch needs to be gone today.

From 15 keywords to 95.

In February the site ranked for 15 keywords in the US. By June it ranked for 95. The organic footprint has held since, and the pages that took the longest to come back are the commercial ones that bring in paying jobs.

Figures are Semrush US organic estimates for ezjunkandhauling.com, pulled 22 September 2026. Semrush traffic is an estimate, not analytics data, and month to month movement in a market this size is normal.