Don't Get Hacked
Posted 21st February, 2009 in by Sam
Over the last little while, I've noticed my site gets a lot less search engine traffic - meaning I'm no longer showing up for things that I used to show up for in search engines like Google. As you can see from the screen grab above, the Google cached version of my page shows over a hundred instances of a certain word on my front page. What?!
I had a hard time tracking down the cause of this, but eventually found a base64 encoded chunk of code in one of my theme files that was pulling in the links and only feeding them to the Google Spider. That means normal users would not see the links at all but that Google and other search engines would. Here is what Google currently thinks my blog is all about:
Hmmm... not very cool.
Anyway - problems fixed so next time the Google spider comes around (which isn't much these days) everything should start fixing itself. Now on to the point of this article: Don't Get Hacked.
I wanted to set up a way to monitor if I ever get hacked again. Google Alerts to the rescue! Google Alerts will notify you of new additions to any search query. You could set up a Google Alert to tell you every time someone mentions your name or your business or whatever. In fact, a lot of businesses use this tool to manage their reputation online.
So I set up a Google alert thusly:
So from now on, every time Google sees that certain word appear in my site's content, I'll know about it immediately and don't have to wait until I lose all my traffic. I set up the feed in my Google Reader account (you can also have it deliver alerts to an email address) so that I will see in real time when my site has been compromised.
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4 comments so far:
Sam O (not verified) says: Ouch! Good pickup! Hope it
Ouch! Good pickup! Hope it all resumes to normal. Makes me wonder how many websites are using this method to bump up their traffic and pagerank...
Shep (not verified) says: great idea. what do you
great idea. what do you think the chances are of getting hacked for the same keyword twice?
Sam says: When that keyword is the one
When that keyword is the one I mentioned, chances are pretty good. But I only used it as an example, you could do a boolean search for WORD1 OR WORD2 OR WORD3...
Dustin (not verified) says: Last time I was searching
Last time I was searching for cheap Canadian *****, your site came up and I was like, "Gthing must be the local dealer, why has he been holding back?". I was sorely disappointed when you offered no such uplifting prescriptions.
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