Check weather your website is hacked

Having your website hacked has changed a lot in the last few years. It used to be that hackers would hijack your site, lock you out, and change how it looks. It was really obvious that you were hacked.

Now it's all about links. They'll embed hundreds of pharmaceutical links into your site and make it so you and I don't even know about them. Of course they're trying to trick Google but hurts you.

If Google suspects you're working with these guys you'll get delisted from their search engine and you won't rank for any keywords. No matter how hard you try.

So how do you know if you've been hacked?

Good question.

You can't just look at your HTML code because these guys make the links only appear for Google (link cloaking). So you need to see how Google sees your site.

Here's how to do it:

Step 1: Go To Google and search for your site. Then choose the "Cached" link. This is what Google sees. View your page source and look for the spam links. If you've been hit there will be hundreds of them. Don't ask me why someone so smart can be so stupid but they always embed hundreds of links (not just one or two or they'd probably get away with it). The spam links are usually at the very top or bottom of your page.

Step 2: Set up a Google Alert so if you get hacked Google will tell you in a few minutes. Use this link:
http://www.google.com/alerts

Here's an example:

Search Term is:
site:xxx.yourdomain.cm [insert your favorite pharmaceutical word here]

So basically I'm telling Google "the minute you find a reference to this on my site email me about it".

That's it!

BTW - If you have wordpress you WILL GET HACKED. There's just too many plug-ins out there and too many installs. Just like Windows they're a big target so hackers hit them first. So set this up right away.

Sorry for the long post I just wanted to share this with you because it's so important to know. I'm seeing more and more sites getting hit with these attacks.

yep, it would be a whole lot smarter to jsut put in one or two links but these are greedy bastards, I already knew about this but thanks anyway.

Recently i got Hacked by

Mr.RoSSyPaPPa

WP update make that bulshit out

But google alert is good share for future use

I usually just to make sure that every WP plugins is from trusted source, also actually better if we use not many plugins.. just remove the useless..

I just looked at the weather news and couldn't find out if any of my websites were hacked...

Jeevs that is scary, I did not realize that hhis could happen, thanks for the heads up, I will follow your advice and have Google monitor

Yes, its better to avoid unwanted plug-ins to save the site from hackers. However google alerts is useful

Along with never using Nulled scripts and Themes I'd have to add FTP accounts. I got a WP site of mine hacked briefly and the swine got in via FTP. After checking my log files I discovered access was gained by a temporary FTP account I set up to allow someone from support (for a paid plugin) to have a look at what was causing a problem.

Like a noob I didn't set a strong password and then even worse when the work was complete I didn't delete the account

It could easily have been bruteforced or maybe the support persons PC had a trojan. Either way it's always best to delete any FTP accounts you're not using and check your servers log files frequently for IP addresses that aren't yours.