Hackers, what thoughts pass through your head when you hear that word? Some people will be thinking of top secret spy agencies, with lots of high tech gear, pounding away at keyboards, wiping sweat from their brow as they disable CCTV systems and edit bank accounts to complete that oh so exciting multi million pound bank job. Meanwhile others will simply get the impression of a chubby, spotty teenager sat in their room laughing as they make swear words appear on peoples computer screens, but whichever impression you have, the fact of the matter is that website hacking is a serious problem, which unfortunately effects scores of people every year, with extremely frustrating results.
One of the common reasons malicious third parties may hack a website is so that they can use it as leverage to alter search engine results in their favour, which is often done through injecting links. This is more often than not done through the hackers taking control of your website, and putting hidden links to their websites, so that the web master may not see anything different about their website, but when a search engine comes along to crawl your site, they will pick up on these links, which could then work to the hackers websites advantage, and your websites detriment!
Another often seen reason behind hacking is for, instead of directing links to their website, the hackers will simply redirect the traffic of your website to their own, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this will not only lose you traffic, and potentially sales, but it will also make users suspicious of ever returning to your site again, and we certainly don’t want that!
Luckily though there are ways of recovering your website from potential hacker damage, and a lot of that comes down to the search engine Google. If your website is registered with their web master tools service, if they come across something untoward on your website, they will flag this up with you, giving you an alert that your website has been compromised, so that you know action needs taking straight away.
The two best and most simple ways to cure the problems noted above are, for the former, using the “Fetch as Google” tool which will show you exactly how Google see’s your website, so that you can remove any secretive hidden links. The latter, redirecting users issue may take a little bit more technical work as it may include work modifying server files or scanning through the code of your website, but once the malicious files or code have been removed, your site will be clean once more. Once this is done you can simply send a “Reconsideration Request” to Google, who will scan your website, and if it is clean, they will stop marking it as compromised and go back to viewing you as a nice, healthy contribution to the world wide web!
Here at Dijitul we understand how worrying a hacking incident on your website can be, but we also recognise that some people may not feel confident in trying to remove malicious content from their website, which is why we are always striving to help those affected.
Therefore, if you have worries that your website may have been compromised, or you wish to find out more about hacking and protecting your website from any future incidents, then please do not hesitate to get in touch with the Dijitul.com Web Development team today on 01623 650333, or find out more from the official Google post on hacking.
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