How to quickly tell if your site is hacked

Have you ever wondered if your site is hacked? Sometimes it's hard to tell, because hackers try hard not to leave visible traces making it obvious. More than once I've noticed that this site in particular has been hacked just because I was playing around with the layout of the site and closely look at the HTML code that is generating WordPress.

These days, but there is an easy way to check for hacking by doing a Google search as follows:

site: yourdomain.com viagra

This works for two reasons:

Google crawls the most sites very regularlyHacked websites are used to enhance the search engine rankings from other sites using keyword-targeted links to these sites

You can use the term "viagra" shall be replaced by almost ED-related drugs such as "levitra" or "cialias". or more generic terms like "online recipe".

Note that your pages still may agree with these terms in Google even after you have eradicated the hacking, as it may take a while for them to be blotted out of Google's cache. you will still want to check out the HTML code of some of the pages that Google thinks are hacked just to be sure, especially the inner pages.

As I said, it's a quick test not 100% accurate, but a good indicator.

Of course, if you regularly about viagra and their ilk talk, this method did not work at all

PS: getting rid of these links is important, because Google will penalize your site for sure if it's to them by the site less often creep and dropping pages. you should be vigilant!

April 6, 2010 | filed under General

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