Fri, 4 Apr 2008 11:43:26 by Matt Hopkins
If you've followed our blog over the past few months, you will have noticed a lot of posts relating to sites being hacked for the purposes of search engine optimisation. This is a relatively new phenomenon and gaining in frequency.
One of our SEO CDM's (Kerry Dye) has just had an article published in the March issue of Network Security Newsletter - called "Website abuse for search engine optimisation". You can register to get a free issue on their website or you can view the specific article on ScienceDirect.com.
In case you may be concerned about your own site, here are three ways that will help you tell if you have been "link hacked":
1. Visual check - obvious perhaps, but regularly check your site's homepage and make sure that nothing is out of place. One of our clients recently was the victim of an attack that did not involve their own site at all, but the tracking code of their 3rd party analytics tool. The javascript was modified so that any visitor was redirected to an adsensespammer site somewhere... this was naturally picked up and corrected very quickly.
2. Source code check - most of the time, hacker attacks involve the addition of source code that may not be visible on the rendered page. They add some additional HTML to your site that is then "hidden" usingCSS (style-sheets) and only noticeable by reviewing the actual source code of your site (e.g. right click on the page and select "view source").
3. Know where you are linking to - it can be easy to miss source code changes, especially if you are not familiar with "raw" HTML. As most of the hacking attacks involve adding additional links to your site, then you should regularly check the list of sites that you are linking out to. Vertical Leap has a tool called Outbound Links Checker that will email you a list of the external/outbound pages that your site is linking to, but you may find alternatives that will be equally effective. I would recommend checking this monthly.
If you need more information or have a suspicion about your own site, please feel free to contact us for help.
Matt Hopkins
Managing Director |
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