Compromised Website and SEO rankings – We have secure hosting

Your website is compromised, how does it affect your SEO rankings?

Have you ever thought some hackers might have access to your website? Maybe not. You may be thinking, “I am a small business owner who would want to hack my website?” On the internet a website of any size can be compromised for various reasons.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

One valid reason related to search engine optimization is to build thousands of back links to gain instant boost in search engine rankings. This is NOT GOOD FOR YOUR WEBSITE; this is often referred as Black Hat SEO. Google’s page rank depends on the number of back links your website has and Page rank is one of the variables of Google algorithm that determines your website’s rankings on Google. The more links you have the better, but NOT From link farms and content networks. What sp@mmers create massive link networks for instant traffic boost to adult based or pill selling websites.

When a website is compromised what you see is lot of SP@M links/pages hosted on your hosting account. Generally, website owners have no idea what is happening on their website. It’s because they never notice anything unusual when they access the website. What spammers do is they create thousands of links containing words like Vi@gr@, p1lls, weight loss and host Malware pages on your site without your knowledge. They even use some websites to sell these.

Google takes malware seriously and by participating in the link spam, your website can suffer in SEO rankings. Your website may be still ranking for your business name, but if this carries on for along time Google will remove the site from its index. You have to start all again after cleaning all the mess.

We suggest spending more money to get a better website that is securely hosted. It is well worth the pain you may have to go through later on. (Site down, stealing your customers data, infecting their computers..etc.)

How to find out if your site is compromised with Malware?

Google webmaster tool reports Malware on your website hosting account. All you have to do is register your website with Google Webmaster tools and check the section called Malware under diagnostics. If your site is not compromised this is what you see (click on image), otherwise you will see a last crawled date and when Malware is noticed. And also by registering your site you will get an instant email if it ever happens again.

Use Yahoo Site Explorer to Find Links on your website

If your website is not crawled by Google regularly it may take months to get a notification from Google. Another way you can find out is by checking your website links using Yahoo site Explorer. Once you enter your website URL, click on explore URL.

Click on pages, this shows the pages indexed from your website, you will see approximate number of pages and also links that looks like in the image on right (click on image), if you notice any unidentified pages check your website to find those pages. If you don’t see these links on your website, it means there is something not right with the site.

Now click on Inlinks, this shows you website inbound links. Change the “show in links” settings as shown in the image below to find out inbound links. If you see lots of links from sites unrelated to your industry and if you see links from website selling drugs this means SP@M!

If you think your website is compromised give us a call at +1 (778) 471-5953, we will work with you to resolve the issue and help you get back on your search engine rankings. For link building purposes, we at ROI Media Works use industry certified link building tools to find non-spammy web sites and we only use white hat SEO techniques.

Check out the link building best practices guide here. Like us on Facebook for regular free tips on search engine optimization and social media marketing. Follow us on Twitter. Also, don’t forget to ask us about our secure hosting options.

P.S: This is a case study done for a  fitness training studio website, website was developed and maintained by a local web design company. We have blurred the website names to protect the  business owner.