BlogStorm has an excellent post today about something very simple you can do to help protect your site.
The problem, as they see it:
Every month thousands of websites get hacked into and have hidden links inserted into the pages by people wanting their spam sites to rank highly in the search engines.
I agree with them — it’s a substantial issue. The bigger problem is that many sites don’t realize they’ve been hacked for a quite while; often they only realize it when their traffic from Google dries up.
If you get hacked, Google will stop sending traffic to your site but they won’t tell you about the problem. However, you can build a few simple Google Alerts to notify you instead. BlogStorm suggests you set up and alert that looks like this:
viagra OR cialis OR levitra OR Phentermine OR Xanax site:mickmelseo.com
If you get hacked even a little bit, one of those terms is bound to appear. If it does, Google will let you know about it very quickly and you can dig in and fix the problem.
I’ve used Google Alerts for a while now to notify me of any news items that might have slipped past my Twitter and RSS reading, but this is a new take on it. It’s simple and effective. Great tip!