A while back, I wrote a post about how my blog was hacked and what I did about it. Turns out it dropped me out of Google for a week or two, but the experience was well worth it. Shortly thereafter, Eric Bramlett posted the solution of setting Google Alerts on your site. (Can’t find it, or I’d link to it). Trace and others had some good comments and suggestions as well. I did what Bramlett suggested and I want to show you an example of how it works.
This morning, I received an alert (one of many that I have on my site), to wit:
Google Web Alert for: site:ericonsearch.com +viagra
High gas prices and online marketing…a correlation? : Southern …
… phentermine shipped tramadol without perscription dopamine phentermine generic cialis pills generic viagra levitra prescribing information valium valium …
This as-it-happens Google Alert is brought to you by Google.
I quickly went and found the offending post(s) and promptly deleted hundreds of “bad neighborhood” links. Nice. And yes. I am making further changes to beef security that I am not going to talk about publicly. Will be happy to share them with you privately one to one if you have been hacked.
The good news about this go around is that we are being PROACTIVE and getting to them before we have to bug Google or other search engines about it. By setting yourself up a boatload of alerts for site:mydomain.com +(insert poker,porn, or pharmaceutical term), you can get ahead of any issues that arise.
If you Google “Indiana SEO” or other similar terms, you will see that as of today’s date, I am still blessed to be doing OK for now.
So if you haven’t taken the time to do this to your blog… Now’s a good time.
Lou Lynch says:
Always helping out . . . Thanks for the info Eric!
I have been using google alerts for a while now and find a lot of creative uses for them i.e. writing topics, personal reputation management, spying on my competitors, etc.
Great one to add to the list, thanks again.
October 7, 2008 — 6:23 am
JDallas says:
How did they hack it ? If you want to make them have to work for it, just use an Ubuntu system, and only have a superuser be able to modify your webpages. If you want to be paranoid about it you could try BSD, I can’t remember which one (Net , Open , Free) hasn’t had a remote exploit in years. Just my two cents (unless of course they exploited your php , that is another story … ).
October 7, 2008 — 8:23 am
J Boyer Morristown NJ says:
Always helpful Eric. Keep up the great work. I thankfully have not had that one happen to me yet.
October 7, 2008 — 12:23 pm
Malok says:
@JDallas – I’m not certain Eric would want to get into specifics on a “how to”, but think brute force techniques along with on page scanning for article authors (and accounts) and I’m certain you can draw your own conclusions.
October 8, 2008 — 9:17 am
Eric Blackwell says:
I have received comments privately from several people. I have not had a chance to send them a reply privately, but will do so in the next day or two. Sorry for the late replies. It is busy here.
There are many ways to defend against attacks, but you still, IMO, need a way of letting you know when someone gets through (and using Google’s spider to carry the heavy water works well IMO, because that is the goal of a hacker anyway is to get their links recognized by Google…).
Best;
Eric
October 8, 2008 — 9:24 am
French Property says:
I did exactly what you suggested and within a day I had an alert from google which made it possible to nip in the bud someones spamming activity so just a note to sy “Thanks” 🙂
Katie
October 10, 2008 — 10:23 am
Eric Blackwell says:
@Katie-
Good to meet you.
Glad it helped.
Best;
Eric
October 10, 2008 — 10:54 am