What is hacked site recovery?

According to Forbes, nearly half a million websites get hacked every single day. Malicious code – spam, malware and other forms of hacking – can put your site in jeopardy. Your search engine traffic could be crippled, hijacked and redirected somewhere else, even flat out blocked because of a few foreign lines in your code.

Every day, people desperate to short cut the optimisation process are finding new ways to break in and exploit the code that makes up your site. Vulnerabilities crop up all the time, especially if you use plugins (a WordPress SEO plugin, for example), and hackers are always on the lookout for new angles of attack.

There are a few common hacks that will directly affect your traffic. Malicious redirects can take advantage of your visibility in the search engines, lure visitors in, and then divert your traffic elsewhere. Something called the 'Pharma Hack' can change your site’s meta data so it appears to Google (but to nobody else) to be advertising cheap medical drugs, damaging your site’s credibility and traffic numbers.

The problem is that malicious code can be very hard to detect. Your site can be infected for months, the code completely invisible to your developers but silently preying on your traffic. Google can sometimes spot a compromised site without knowing exactly how you’ve been vandalised, flagging your site with a warning to users. For most types of malware, however, you’re only going to see the effects – not the cause.

What we can do

If you suspect you’ve been the victim of hacking, especially one that hijacks your search engine rankings or gets you lableled by Google as hosting malware, having one of our experts manually check your site for malicious code is the most effective way to stay secure. Our team has over 20 years’ experience in technical SEO, and we make sure to stay on top of the latest search engine hijacking trends.

Very often the hack on your site is supported by offsite activity, like other sites being hacked to plant hidden links to your site with spammy anchor text, something that happens especially often with the Pharma Hack. We can find, profile and clean these links before they do too much harm. 

We can identify the presence of malicious code, assess the damage that has been done, and establish the next steps to recovery. We can either suggest a plan for recovery that will guide your developer, or we can do the fix ourselves. Either way, we can come up with a plan to cure your site.

To find and eliminate malicious code on your site, contact us or call today on +44 (0) 3301 333480.