These days when online earning through blogs and websites is turning into one of the most appealing businesses, there are unavoidable risks of getting your website been hacked. How about malicious content been injected on your website, forcing your readers to never come back to pay a visit? The thought is itself awful, isn’t it? A good news is, Google has lately announced that it has some solutions for those webmasters who are the victim of website hacking.As I have been saying in my previous posts, Google is smart enough to keep a track of everything, all the time and hence according to the new policies, the site that would be detected as a “hacked website” would be displayed with a warning message “This Site may be compromised”. This has been done to ensure safety of the users who might find the affected site in the search results and find themselves been overloaded with the malicious content.
What makes this news worthy to read is the fact that as a blogger, it is important for you to find whether your blog/website is at risk or not, because in case, it is, then there are wide chances that your website becomes a source to distribute the malicious content among your devoted readers. Moreover, when Google realizes that your site is compromising to facilitate the distribution of malwares, even your site would be having a warning indication in the Google search, affecting your page ranks and your earnings terribly. Therefore, Google has advised all the webmasters to verify their site in Webmaster Tools. Although there are some specific tips for preventing and removing malware from your site, it is still better to be on a safer side to avoid going through a bad phase in business.
A disease can be cured only if you predict it right; however, a dilemma here is that most of the Webmasters do not actually realize when their sites have been infected with the injected malwares. To overcome this, there are two common ways that can help in letting you know that there are malicious third- parties on your website. Let us first see these two ways and then we will talk about how to get your site cleaned from this unwanted mess.
1) Injected Content
As a blogger, you might know by now that what actually these hackers aim for, yes, all they want is to drag your potential traffic to their own sites. One common attempt of doing so is to influence search engines by injecting the links of their sites. This is done way too intelligently where these links are hidden, making their detection difficult by the webmaster. For example, injected malwares appear with your content, making it difficult for the webmaster to identify that he is a victim.
Solution:
Making it easier for you, Google will diagnose all the sites for such injected content, and if your site is one of them, you will receive an e-mail about the notification of this detection. If you would find the content risky, you can then use Fetch as Google tool to check the content of your site.
2) Redirecting Users
There would be hardly anyone who would like to be redirected every time when he visits a site. A good way to hack a site is to redirect its users to malicious sites. This is what the users really hate and might never return to your site in fear of getting redirected again to spammy sites. Again, this can be done in several ways where the hacker might target the viewers who access your site through their mobiles or those who are coming from search engines. It was interesting to find that what actually hackers do. They actually modify the configuration files and serve different users with different contents.
Apart from this, such a hacking can also be done by injecting JavaScript into the source code of your site.
Solution:
In order to avoid this, you need to keep a track of your server configuration files for such modifications. For the malicious behavior due to the JavaScript injection, the JavaScript may be designed to hide its purpose, helping terms look like, for example, “eval”, “decode” and “escape”.
Cleanup your Site and Prevent Hacking!
With the two common ways stated above, you can get to know whether your site is compromised or not. If you find your site in risk, then it is necessary to clean it up from the changes that the malwares have brought with them, also preventing your site from getting hacked in future again. You can clean up your site by following the instructions given by Google and prevent such compromises too.
However, you need to consider the sensitivity of the matter and must contact the Google team, informing about your site been compromised. For that you need to submit a reconsideration request after you clean up your site. This is important so that Google can then remove its warning label (indicating you as a compromised site) from its search results.
With that, the post comes to an end, We hope that nothing happens to the sites of our readers, because once affected, it really can bring disastrous outcomes.
Best Wishes,
