Blogs are very much vulnerable to external attacks and that means, if you are the owner of a popular blog, you need to be prepared for an impending attack. If you are unprepared for a malware attack, you are going to lose valuable data.
Things might get extremely complicated if you don’t have any backup of your website. In that case, you will have to manually set up your blog and publish the blog posts again one by one. This is exhausting and extremely time-consuming.
And if this is not annoying enough, you will have to figure out what have actually went wrong with your blog. There is a list of things that you need to do to recover the lost positions of your blog on search engine result pages and to identify the issues on your blog so that it does not get attacked again – Â
Google Safe Browsing diagnostic
This is the coolest ever tool available for free use. As the name suggest, this tool will diagnosis the problem and let you know what went wrong with your website. Moreover, icing on the cake, this tool will give you a brief history of the website of the past ninety days and that will surely come to real help, if you are serious enough to dig down to the core of the problem.
Google will also let you know if they have found any suspicious activity on the website in the given period of time and do not wonder if it shows some links of external sites. It can be caused by third party applications that you are most likely using in your blog to make it look cool. So, not cool if it is harboring malicious code. Get it removed at the earliest. Are you still wondering how to use this tool, just replace example.com with your domain name:
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=example.com
Fetch As Google Bot
To access this awesome tool, you need to be the verified owner of the blog in Google webmaster tool. This is pretty easy. Once you are done with the registration and verification thing, just use this tool to see how Google bot sees your website. There are some malware usually attacks .htaccess file and then shows one version of the website to general users and a completely different version to search engine. Now, this is virtually impossible to track this kind of hacking with open eyes, so you need to borrow Google’s, just kidding though. Just put the URL and let Google bot shows what it finds in your website or alternatively you can simply check the cached copy of your website in Google. If it renders a completely different thing, I fear you need to pull your socks and get ready for some serious action.
Security Issues
Google webmaster tool automatically sends you update if Google bots find anything sneaky that might be you might be overlooking. You can find a detail report of malware, if there is any, in the Dashboard >> Security Issue section of your webmaster tool account.
Check Keywords
Supposed you are blogging on Design and development, so that simply means, Google webmaster tool will show related keywords in keyword section. But if you find some weird keywords like – viagra, sex etc in between, there is something to be worried about for sure. Try to find how which pages contain these keywords and you will be able to track the culprit code. Remove it and have fun.
Once you are done with the search and destroy operation, you need to send a reconsideration request to Google, mentioning everything. The good thing is that Google has made its review system quite fast and it will not take more than 4 to 5 hours to remove the sign – ‘this Site may harm your computer’.
