How To Quickly Tell If Your Site Has Been Hacked
Have you ever wondered if your site has been hacked? Sometimes it’s hard to tell, because hackers try hard not to leave any visible tracks that make it obvious. More than once I’ve noticed that this site in particular has been hacked only because I was playing around with the layout of the site and looking closely at the HTML that WordPress was generating.
These days, however, there’s an easy way to check for hacking by doing a Google search like so:
site:yourdomain.com viagra
This works for two reasons:
- Google crawls most sites very regularly
- Hacked sites are used to increase the search engine rankings of other sites using keyword-targeted links to those sites
You can replace the term “viagra” with almost any ED-related drug like “levitra” or “cialias”. Or more generic terms like “online prescription”.
Note that your pages may still match these terms in Google even after you’ve eradicated the hacking, as it may take a while for them to be expunged from Google’s cache. You’ll still want to check the HTML of some of the pages that Google thinks have been hacked just to be sure, especially the inner pages.
As I said, it’s a quick test. Not 100% accurate, but a pretty good indicator.
Of course, if you regularly talk about Viagra and their ilk, this method won’t work at all…
P.S.: Getting rid of these links is important, because Google will definitely penalize your site if it finds them by crawling the site less often and dropping pages. You have to be vigilant!
5 Years of Blogging – Part 1
As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m shortly coming up on 5 years of blogging, which still astounds me when I think of it. There are now many people who have been blogging for five or more years, so it’s not that unusual anymore, but it’s longer than I expected to be running this blog. The official anniversary date will be May 30, 2010, which is exactly five years after my first post. In preparation for this anniversary, I’m going to run a retrospective series about this blog, blogging in general, AdSense, search engine optimization, Internet marketing, and other related topics — whatever comes to mind, I guess, as I peruse five years worth of posts.
Let’s start with a few stats. Not counting this post, I have 1048 posts, which comes out to be about 210 posts per year, or just under 18 posts per month. Oddly enough, that’s pretty close to the 20 or so working days there is in a month. My output’s decreased quite noticeably in the last year or so, mind you, but for a while I was pretty much posting something once or twice a day.
Comments… There are over 3000 approved comments. I currently have 2400 pending comments, but most of those are spam (both out-and-out spam but also lots of “I like your site!” and “Keep up the good work!” and “Nice article!” type comments) and I’ve gotten into the habit of blowing away the entire pending comment pool when it gets too big to navigate… Lots of commenters are showing up lately because the blog is near the top of list of “dofollow” blogs and everyone’s trying to get a nice juicy link from a PR4 page back to their site. Too bad I moderate all comments… if you don’t have anything worthy to say, don’t bother commenting!
I can’t say this blog ranks highly for many keywords in Google. For “adsense” it’s around #70. Even though I have a fair number of inbound links (about 50,000 according to Yahoo!), only about half of the pages on this site are actually in Google’s index and only 400 or so of them show up when you do a “site:memwg.com” query. There are different reasons for this. One is that the site’s been hacked numerous times — I took out some injection code just yesterday that was putting lots of links for popular pharmaceuticals into my pages. It’s also been losing link velocity — the speed at which incoming links are made — because I haven’t been updating it very much lately. And I don’t have a lot of deep links into the site, which is another problem — most of the links are directed at the root of the domain.
Anyhow, in part 2 we’ll actually start the retrospective by looking at 5 things I’d wish I’d done different from the beginning.
Coming Up To 5 Years Of Fun!
I just realized the other day that this blog is almost 5 years old now…. the first post was on May 30, 2005. Wow. I should do something to celebrate. But what? Let me know what you think….