Every month thousands of websites get hacked into and have hidden links inserted into the pages by people wanting their spam sites to rank highly in the search engines.
Most SEO companies, including mine, see a good number of hacked websites, usually after the site owner contacts us wanting to find out why their Google traffic has suddenly dropped for no apparent reason.
Matt Cutts has stated that 2008 will be the year hacking and SEO collide:
2008 will be the year that hacking and search engine optimization (SEO) collide in a major way. By the end of the year, a nontrivial fraction of blackhat SEO will involve illegally hacking sites for links or landing pages.
One webhost will get a significant black eye as hundreds or thousands of customers’ websites are hacked. The growth of illegal-blackhat SEO will leave traditional blackhats with a difficult choice: risk doing something illegal or sit out.
Google doesn’t give you a warning when they see lots of links to black hat sites – they just stop sending traffic to the pages that contain them. If the hacker has only added the code to a few of your pages the traffic drop can be quite small and it becomes almost impossible to diagnose the problem.
Clearly what we need is some kind of easy to use method for site owners to get a notification as soon as these links are added. Because the hackers often hide the links from everybody apart from Google it’s clear that we need to leverage the Google spider to do the work for us.
Luckily Google Alerts allows us to create advanced search queries so we can set up an alert to monitor our websites for any terms that might appear when a hacker takes control. Of course we can’t monitor every term but it is a very good starting point.
To get started we need to think of a few likely spam terms that people might like to inject in our site and then use them to make up a search query:
viagra OR cialis OR levitra OR Phentermine OR Xanax site:blogstorm.co.uk
Next simply go to Google Alerts and enter the query above into the “Create a Google Alert” box and you will get an email whenever Google spots one of your chosen spam words on your site.