Hackers Can Ruin Your Rankings

28/06/08 10:16 AM

You think of hackers taking down sites, holding companies to ransom and stealing credit card details, but you probably never thought they could destroy your rankings. It’s true they can get your site penalised by Google.

Google pride themselves on having a clean index and on the whole I think they do a pretty good job. The serps are relevant of good quality and on the whole virus free. There are exceptions and I think in the adult side of things Google could improve a little on cracking down on ranking sites with viruses, but that said I feel safe using Google to search.

Unfortunately this clean index comes at a price to some webmasters. If your site gets hacked and you do not realise then the hacker could place a virus in the your website, so that when a visitor visits a certain page a virus is downloaded onto their pc. This is common place. So when Google discover this they will remove your site from the index and mark the site as Hacked. This can be seen in your Google Webmaster Tools. Always have these setup for all your websites.

This is well and good as once you realise you can fix the problem and then submit the site via webmaster tools to say the problem has been fixed. Google will then put your rankings back to normal. If the site is commercial this could still loose you revenue.

But this is not the worst that can happen. A hacker could hack your site and not put a virus in. They could do something that Google would not pick up as a Hacker, but rather think you did it. Yes they could add invisible text. Worst still they could add loads of invisble links to your website. Hey it can get worst still they could add loads of invisible links with pornographic anchor text.

Google would then penalise your site on 3 accounts. 1)Invisibilty, 2)Over 100 links on one page, 3)Linking to bad neighbourhoods.

In this circimstances you will not only loose rankings but Google will think you did it and it could take sometime to get back in the rankings. You would need to do a reconsideration request and explain. But you can site in a que for sometime before they worked out you were inocent. And even then you would have to give some convinsing evidence that it was not you.

There is something you can do to stop hackers from destroying all your search engine optimsation. Make sure your site is coded well. Keep blog software bang up to date. Wordpress will tell you in the control panel when there is an update. Make sure you do them as soon as they come available, as these often plug security wholes. You can even add a firewall to your website. Be careful.

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