Monday, March 01, 2010 at 3:00 PM
Webmaster Level: All
As we crawl the web, we see bad content inserted on to thousands of hacked sites each day. The number of sites attacked is staggering and the problem is only getting worse. Hackers and spammers target and successfully compromise any sites they can - small personal sites, schools and universities, even multinational corporations. Spam attacks against forums and user content sections of sites, though not as shocking, are even more widespread.
You may have read in an earlier post that we've begun notifying webmasters about new software versions via Webmaster Tools to help protect their sites. Continuing with our effort to provide more useful information to webmasters, we're happy to announce that we'll soon be sending even more notifications to the Message Center.
Starting this month, we will notify more webmasters of more potential issues we've detected on their websites, including:
- Spammy or abused user-generated content
- Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
- Suspected hacking
These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google's search results. If it pertains to a hacking or abuse issue, the notification will point to example URLs exhibiting this type of behavior. These notifications will run in parallel with our existing malware notifications.
A notice of suspected hacking, for example, will look like this:
We've been notifying webmasters of suspected hacking for years, but a recent upgrade to our systems will allow us to notify many more site owners that have been hacked. We hope webmasters will find these notifications useful in making sure their sites are clean and secure, ultimately providing a better user experience for their visitors. In the future, we may extend this effort even further to include other types of vulnerabilities or abuse issues.
Just as before, webmasters who have not already signed up for Webmaster Tools may still do so and retrieve previously sent messages within one year of their send date. And if you don't want to miss out on any important messages, remember to use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.
34 comments:
Good news, this can help webmaster know how to deal with this. Thanks
This is pretty cool!
I just deleted everything on a site because of malware. Very annoying. Hopefully I can use this feature if I experience the problem again in the future!
Keep up the good work, Webmasters Tools, You're already way better than the similar service at Bing or Yahoo! ;)
My site was hacked via the wordpress plugins and the attacker put hidden spam links on every page of my 5,000 page site so according to webmaster tools, google thinks my site is about viagra, cialis, prescription and levitra (whatever that is). I luckily noticed the change in the source code, and have fixed the issue, hopefully google will notice my site is not about male sexual dysfunction soon (how long does the keywords in webmasters take to change?). Nonetheless you should log into your webmaster account at least once a week to notice any keyword changes.
great
Very nice step :)
This is much in need, I was hacked last week and received no notification. My keywords in webmaster tool were all porn.
I received no notifivation, the only way I knew was from my rank tracking reports when I was virtually deindexed.
I had a host of sites hit by mysql injection attacked through a hole in our website hosts databases.
Once I found the code and deleted it, it was simple to get the bot to check and the warning was taken off the google search results page.
Since then I always check my accounts for this.
Another cool tool
Thanks. It will be really great to get an update.
What I would criticize about google is that in my opinion it is failing to put the better sites on the top.
For example, i would like to see google ignore sites with ILLEGAL content, illegal torrents, file sharing illegal sites, ETC ETC... those are ranking on the top of google, while other sites that work hard, can't hardly rank well.
i would really like to see google fight spam software and black hat software, but i seriously can't see google get a hold of them...
every time i do a search of a movie, i see all illegal sites in the top 10... i can't understand how those sites manage to rank so well.. while others that WORK hard and honest to rank well, can't get more than 10 hits per day from google... and they also only get 100 hits per day from google images hotlinking their images... its pretty frustrating to work hard during 1 full year handwriting a site and getting natural back links, to find out that the site gets only 10 hits per day... while illegal sites are on the top with 4000 hits from google per day... Its very very frustrating for a honest site owner...
It would be great if we could get an Atom/RSS feed of these messages.
Being as this blog post is in part about comment spam, I find the 5th comment, which was posted March 1, 2010 11:11 PM, to be a pretty ironic case in point of the problem.
We recently been the victim of this, where a hacker has injected useless spammy keywords within our blog post title's and content to show to spider.
Luckily we caught this in early stage, but it's a great news to recieve alerts from Google at webmaster tool's. Thanks Google :-)
I just had an query, I would be glad if Google Team can share their views.
My question is suppose if some honest site has been hacked or infected by injected spammy kw's by hacker's. As you said you'll send the notification message and steps to overcome....Does Google will remove the infected site instantly from SERP index Or will wait for some days.
Does Google informs site owner's before removing such infected site's.
Hah, now that's a very useful functionality.
So for so good:
"Malware details
Google has not detected any malware on this site."
:)
Thank you
Never get this kind of message, thanks
Great feature.
Will be very much helpful
i like it so Much sharing this beautiful post...
Mothers Day Creating
Please remove the post of the spammer above this post. It's guys like you that ruin the web!
Google is the greatest search engine all over the world.
http://www.ansarsunna.com
Best regards.
http://www.ansarsunna.com
This article is talking about fighting against comment spam and funny or not, some guys keep posting comment spam even here.
Take a look at the name they are posting comments with: Salt Lake City Web Design, SEO Doctor, Internet Retailing in Australia...
And wait, there is the master of the comment spams, the king of them, posting here a comment with no more than 8 links to his website about shoes!! :))
What can I say? Don't give up, keep fighting :)))
Hey Snowalker, firstly I am not a spammer, secondly you will note that the post with the eight shoe links has been removed after I requested its removal, that was the point of my post. FYI Internet Retailing in Australia is the name of my blog, I cannot control the way Blogger automatically inserts my user ID there, as I logged in through my Google open ID which includes blogger. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing it seems.
It's nice to see this, but I could have used this over a year ago when all of my sites got hacked and deindexed by you guys.
I'm STILL paying the price big time because of a hacker in China.
I have a disease that requires expensive prescription medicines and because of the hacking was unable to afford to pay for it.
Now my disease has progressed and become worse and I may have to have surgery.
I tried and tried to contact someone at Google but to no avail. I feel like my life has been completely destroyed this hacker.
I lost almost all of my income and had to take a low paying job which has now caused me damage to my lower back.
I wish I could get something back for all the damage that has been done to my life. I wish someone at Google would have listened and believed me when I said I had been hacked.
yes I would like to see google to remove companies having 3 websites with different domain names but same company for sure on some pages for certain products. Google has to be impartial and allow only one company per page (natural search and paid search). Otherwise tomorrow I will make 20 websites and will be on the first page of every products i have got on my website !!
Websites with bad content using google translate should be hit badly because language is our history and when I see an english company translating in french using google translate, this is bad. I repeat Google Staff : languages are our HISTORY.
Great. We need all the things thatcan help us battle this... we are going very happy about this...Thanks
hi,
i Have a very good classifieds site running online for USA.
Pls check the site for posting of classifieds.
Top USA Free Classifieds
Pls write back
Many seo are making money by creating more sites for one client and then optimise these sites. That means they bring more than one of their clients' sites on the front page with different names and phone numbers which is unfair. Looks like google is aware of this trend and will take care of it in the future.
Tech from
http://www.computerstar.ca/
I can not google to understand.
I have been working for 3 months continuously for main web site.
first weeks of my site was the first page 5 search on google.
But now it is a fifth side.
I did all the seo applications.
Another site with pr0 is better than mine.
http://www.7emlak.com
please checking for words alanya emlak on google
Also, there is free sites that can help you check if your site is blacklisted or with malware. Example:
http://sucuri.net
It looks for vulnerabilities, malware and other security problems.
My website was ranked #1 in Google when you searched 90's Music. I was hacked, and now am not even listed. I cleaned my site up the same day it was hacked, and it made no impact in saving my Google Rank. I am no making no income. It is very unfair that Google doen't protect our hard work and takes us out of their listing when something like this occurs through no fault of the site owners. Now I am sitting ...waiting...hoping, I get back into the listing. My poor www.musicinthenineties.com site is useless until then.
Hi, we had a site that was hacked by the wonderful viagra spam links. Although we've cleared the problem it still shows up in the Google Index because we are waiting for the site to be re-indexed, naturally people finding the site this was are cautious. Is there any where we can post the link to the relevant page so that a re-index can be done for the site? Any help would be gratefully appreciated. KR, Linda
My blog site was hacked? Is there any way, I can retrieve my blog with posts again?
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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