Has your website been hacked?

How can you tell?

Some webmasters / site owners only find out their website had been hacked, when potential customers do a Google search and find notices about their website saying: 'This site may be compromised' or 'This website may harm your computer'.

Most webmasters / site owners notice their listings in Google have words in them that don't belong on their site, i.e Viagra, Casino, Payday Loan, etc. This is the clearist visual aid that you've been hacked.

Website Hacked? - What To Check For:

Hackers are always getting smarter about the way they hack/deface websites and your website could have been hacked for months without you even noticing. The most common hacks that we are seeing today only effect Search Engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. When these Search Engines visit your website they will see 'spammy links, words' such as 'Buy Viagra Online, prescription, Adobe, casinos, realtytrac, torrent'. A full list of the commonly used terms can be found at the bottom of this article.

The best way to find out if your website has been hacked is using Search Engines, Google offer a number of terms that you can use on your website which will allow you to find out if your website has been hacked. Such terms as 'site:, inurl:, intitle:, indescription:', these terms can help you to identify if your website has been hacked.

site:{your domain}

This will list all of the web pages that Google have indexed that relate to the domain name that you entered

inurl:{term}

This will list all of the pages that Google have indexed that have the search term in the URL. If you search for 'inurl:com_content' you will receive a list of all websites that have 'com_content' in the URL

intitle:{term}

Google will search it's index for all websites that have the search term in the page title

indescription:{term}

Google will search it's index for all websites that have the search term in the page meta description

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