How To Quickly Tell If Your Site Has Been Hacked

Have you ever wondered if your site has been hacked? Sometimes it’s hard to tell, because hackers try hard not to leave any visible tracks that make it obvious. More than once I’ve noticed that this site in particular has been hacked only because I was playing around with the layout of the site and looking closely at the HTML that WordPress was generating.

These days, however, there’s an easy way to check for hacking by doing a Google search like so:

site:yourdomain.com viagra

This works for two reasons:

1. Google crawls most sites very regularly
2. Hacked sites are used to increase the search engine rankings of other sites using keyword-targeted links to those sites

You can replace the term “viagra” with almost any ED-related drug like “levitra” or “cialias”. Or more generic terms like “online prescription”.

Note that your pages may still match these terms in Google even after you’ve eradicated the hacking, as it may take a while for them to be expunged from Google’s cache. You’ll still want to check the HTML of some of the pages that Google thinks have been hacked just to be sure, especially the inner pages.

As I said, it’s a quick test. Not 100% accurate, but a pretty good indicator.

Of course, if you regularly talk about Viagra and their ilk, this method won’t work at all…

P.S.: Getting rid of these links is important, because Google will definitely penalize your site if it finds them by crawling the site less often and dropping pages. You have to be vigilant!