Ack, it’s a Hack!
According to BlogStorm, “Every month thousands of websites get hacked into and have hidden links inserted into the pages by people wanting their spam sites to rank highly in the search engines.” That’s a pretty big problem.
When this happens, the majority of site owners aren’t even aware of it and suddenly Google traffic is completely gone. Why? MickMel says that “if you get hacked, Google will stop sending traffic to your site but they won’t tell you about the problem.” Ack!
How to Save Your Site
Google Alerts to the rescue. Get notified instantly if you’ve been hacked because a majority of hackers use some common terms in their inserted links. It’s actually really simple. First, go to Google Alerts:
Under “Type” select Comprehensive so all types of sites are searched. For “How often,” select as it happens so you’re emailed immediately. Be sure to enter an email address you have open on your desktop so you don’t miss out. For “search terms,” create alerts for the following terms (which I’ve made in image form so Benn doesn’t have 10 trillion spam comments for this one post!):
TIP: don’t set up 100 alerts, do it all at once by using “OR” in caps between each term, so it’ll look like this: “bugs OR dogs OR cats OR fish site:yoursite.com” (make sure it says “site:yoursite.com” so it searches JUST your site, not the entire interwebs)!
Hooray!
So now you’ll know if any icky hackers have planted their flag in your site, hooray!
original image by boboloo
