Google Will Now Alert You if Your Website Has Been Hacked

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Mar 4, 2010

For some time now Google has warned its search users if your site contains malware or other dangerous code. Unfortunately, they did not provide any notification to webmasters of the hacked sites. This meant that website owners usually learned of hacking issues from their customers or site visitors. Not only can that be embarrassing for site owners, but it can also have a severe impact on sales and lead to potential identify theft, especially on banking websites.

Well, now I have good news, especially for banks, credit unions, retail e-commerce and other website owners for whom security and quick response to website hacks is of utmost concern. According to Google's Webmaster blog, Google will now notify webmasters when Googlebot has detected that a website has been hacked.

According to Google, they will now start notifying users who have registered with the Google Webmasters service of several new types of issues, including:

• Spammy or abused user-generated content
• Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
• Suspected hacking

While this is by no means the only method you should rely on for monitoring your website security, I do recommend that you consider taking advantage of the free service from Google to gain the benefit of their watchful eye.

Want to check your page load speed? Google has a page speed tool that you can download as a Firefox plugin.

Disclaimer: As with most advice, you must consider it relative to all other factors related to your site's usability, marketing strategy and overall design requirements. Page load time is just one factor among many to consider when developing your pages.