Barely 7 months after I first came up with the idea of using Google Alerts to find out if your website has been hacked Google has officially decided it’s a good strategy to use.
Check if abused URLs are showing up in Google. Try a site: search on your site to see if anything unfamiliar shows up in Google’s results for your site. You can add words to the query that are unlikely to appear in your content, such as commercial terms or adult language. If the query [site:example.com viagra] isn’t supposed to return any pages on your site and it does, that could be a problem. You can even automate these searches with Google Alerts.
Why this can’t be pushed as a service via Webmaster Central isn’t clear but at least things are moving forward.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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I expect they will be adding a link back to Blogstorm later…… probably too busy fixing their malware reporting system today.
More comments from Patrick AltoftWell I’ve been using Google Alerts for this purpose ever since I first saw it here on BlogStorm…so thanks for being ahead of the times and look forward to your future Google good-practice predictions!
Same here – it’s a neat tip!
I think this method is not particularly good, there are many types of spam that may go unnoticed …
I’ve been using it since you first mentioned it too – not just to find hacking, but also to spot spam I might otherwise have missed in the forums.
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