On the off chance that Google ever suspects that your site has been hacked, they will warn visitors about it in the search results. And obviously if Google marks your site as hacked — it is terrible for business.
How can I tell if my website has been hacked?
- Your website shows some spammy advertising content that you didn’t put up
- Your website redirects to an ‘inappropriate’ site such as a porn site, pharmaceuticals site.
- Your website shows up in search engine results as “this site may be hacked”
- Unusual traffic in your web logs such as unexplained big spikes in traffic, especially from other countries and big upsurge in spam
The above listed are only a few of the ways you can tell without being a techie who has in-depth knowledge of corrupted files.
So you suspect your website was hacked. But how did this happen? Finding out how you were hacked will help address security flaws you may have encountered. Read this post on what might have caused this.
My website has already been labelled as hacked. What do I do now?
First thing, Stay Calm!
- Clean up your machine
- Run an anti virus, malware scan to make sure there are no security vulnerabilities on your computer
- Connect via FTP and change all backend passwords
- Talk to your hosting company and see if they can help you with checking for corrupted files and help you clean up
- Login to your WordPress dashboard and make sure all your plugins and files are updated
- Verify the site with Google again with webmaster tools that all is well again.
Hopefully, you do regular backups of your website and can retrieve any lost data from that.
It’s important to remember that there are crazies out there just waiting for you to slip up.
Getting your website hacked is no fun. At 77th Floor Online we offer website maintenance packages where we keep your website up-to-date and safe. We scan everything on a regular basis so that you never have to be in this situation.
Has your website already been hacked? Get in touch and we can help you fix it and get back to your business.