October 14, 2009 by Jenny Sanderson
#3. Check your site for evidence of hacking
Okay, now I know you may think your site is the most pristine secure thing on the internet but are you absolutely sure you’ve never been hacked? I know I know, but just please take five minutes to do a ‘site:yourdomain.com’ search and see what URLs come up. If everything’s as you thought then fine, but you might be surprised.
It’s important to remember that not all hacks cause catastrophic, or even noticeable, damage. More and more webmasters are finding links inserted into their sites that have nothing to do with what they do. Most of the time these are links to bad neighbourhoods such as malware sites etc.
It’s entirely possible that your site has joined the ranks of sites being covertly used to divert traffic to malicious sites. This, needless to say, is a not good for SEO. It’s best to have a look at your code and URLs regularly to check. For the time it takes, it’s definitely worth it, it happens way more often than most people think.
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