Do you have an open source Content Management system? Usually it’s a great help to have content generated by users and use the open source code capabilities to develop what you need. Unfortunately, more and more sites are getting hacked by search engine spammers. They hack in and code their bad links, exploiting security holes in the open source code. The innocent webmaster has no idea.
Webmasters remain unaware because the links are hidden from human eyes – only visible to search engine robots in order to grab higher positions in search engine ranking. MIT’s Technology Review recommends:
“that anyone running her own website regularly patch the Web server and any software running on it. In the same way that you wouldn’t browse the Web with an unpatched copy of Internet Explorer, you shouldn’t run a website with an unpatched or old version of WordPress, cPanel, Joomla, or Drupal.”
How can LinkAider help?
LinkAider now has a Smart Advisory module that detects excessive linking to a particular domain. And since LinkAider is a robot, similar to Google’s bot and other spiders, it can see the invisible and detect the content for human eyes. For example:
Links like this are invisible to human eye.
How do hacked sites and bad links hurt webmasters?
- Posts and tweets that contain links to your legitimate site can be rejected if malware is detected – reducing your exposure and reputation at the same time
- Sites get removed from search engine indexes completely
- Sites suffer a drop in rankings as a penalty for including spam links
LinkAider’s Smart Advisory module can perform a bad link check and report back to the webmaster on how to contain and correct these code violations.
Beware of Cloaked Spam
Seobook has an interesting story about cloaked spam and how hard it is to detect and remove. A text-only option displays the links and keywords that are hidden on the site. Google has indexed a list of this particular hack on more than 20,000 websites. This Google Reader discussion thread reveals how unsuspecting people are affected by the hack.
What You Can Do: Establish a Routine
- Check if there are any suspicious links using LinkAider
- Perform some manual checks:
“Google, through some of its products, offers webmasters some ways of spotting if a site has been hacked or modified by a third party without permission. For example, by using Google Search you can spot typical keywords added by hackers to your website and identify the pages that have been compromised. Just open google.com and run a site: search query on your website, looking for commercial keywords that hackers commonly use for spammy purposes (such as viagra, porn, mp3, gambling, etc.)”
- Perform your updates when you are notified – especially for the latest Content Management System currently in use.
- Do not use unknown plugins or themes.
- Monitor your site for new links or suspicious activity.
- Ask all of your third-party developers to follow this routine.
Subscribe to LinkAider in order to catch all of the hidden hacks and bad links before they catch you off guard.
