We all know that google has been warning us for some time regarding sites that include malware, however as from december 2010, Google have widened their umbrella of protection to additionally warn users about threats from websites which have been hacked. Website hacking is usually carried out by spammers in an attempt to steal site visitors and exposure for their own means, hackers will compromise a website and then insert links or html redirects to send site visitors to their own site.

Sometimes ofcourse, the reason a website is hacked is far more unscrupulous. One of the favoured strategies employed by phishers for gaining card details is to hack a trusted website, add a credit card checkout page, and use it to collect bank card details. If the hacker is involved in spreading malware, they could also use the site for this purpose. Many people make large sums of cash by distributing malware which influences the search results recieved by the user, providing prefferential listings to web sites that the creator of the malware has been paid to promote.

Googles warning for hacked sites works by inserting the line “warning this website may be compromised” underneath its organic search ranking. According to the help article on this new feature in google webmaster central, the detection process is fully automated, and once identified as hacked, a repaired web site may be submitted for review by its verified owner in webmaster tools, to expedite the removal of the sites search results warning.

From the perspective of a reputable SEO Services provider, hacking another website to provide prefferential listings or traffic for a client is unthinkable, but it does happen, increduously, some people actually hack other websites with the sole objective of building hyperlinks to increase their own rankings. The point of which is fairly obscure to me, as the links are only going to be eliminated as soon as discovered anyway. For me the links that count are the ones that stand the test of time.

In the SEO industry, it always pays to stay ahead of the modifications google make to their results pages, however disparated they might seem from the sphere of SEO. You can guarantee that sooner or later the above hacked website warning message is going to appear underneath the rankings of a paying clients site, and unless you’re up to speed then you will look pretty silly when the telephone rings and the client is firing questions your way and asking what’s going on?

It remains to be seen just what impact the hacked site warning will have on the click through of affected websites, and therefore their traffic. I suppose we will just have to wait and see if this new warning feature is itself open to manipulation. There’s ofcourse a chance that the web site owner of a second position website could seek to hack the site in first position in an effort to purposefully set off the hacked website warning and therefore collect the traffic that would otherwise go to this result.

For more details about Google’s newest changes, check out the High Impact SEO Services blog. Our full web site SEO audits will also highlight any security vulnerabilities that your site has, site audits are available as a stand alone package, or as a part of our holistic SEO Packages

Bloggers who are looking for information about web traffic, please make sure to visit the site which is mentioned right in this passage.

Be Sociable, Share!