With Wordpress quickly becoming the best blogging platform, it only makes sense that there are people living in their mother’s basement creating backdoors, bypasses, and will be trying to hack your blog. Lately, a popular yet equally sneaky hack that a person can do to your Wordpress blog is add invisible links to your blog, increasing their search engine rankings and pagerank. Though it may sound harmless as they aren’t effecting your readers, it is effecting your Google & Blog Relationship.
The point of the post is not how Google Pagerank works (This page may be of some use to readers that are wondering about that), it is about how you could screw yourself in terms of Search Engine Rankings. When you link to random websites that don’t relate to your website, that raises some red flags in the Google Indexer and you could be labeled a “Spam” website/blog. This ultimately lowers your Google Pagerank (they could think the links were paid) and your search return results for keywords that you choose.
With a hacker gaining access to your blog, whos to stop him/her from placing 2000 invisible links to viagara, twinrex, adult, cialis and all of those wonderful spam links that you get Akismet filtering daily? Nothing is the correct answer and the person will make a couple hundred bucks.
How to figure out if you have been hacked is really quite simple:
- First, Update your Wordpress to 2.5.1 to fix any bugs or security fixes.
- Secondly, Get Firefox to check the links of your website.
Once you have Firefox running, open up your blog URL and do the following:
Open up the “Tools” Menu.
Click on “Page Info”
The Page Info Menu Shows Many Things About Your Website.
Look over the “Links” tab to see if there are any weird URLs. If not, then you haven’t been hacked and have nothing to worry about.. Looks good for mine!!
It never hurts to do periodical checks – just to be on the safe side!! 
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10 Comments
Good advice and already checked mine out. Going to post this as well with a link back to your site.
How would you know about weird links?? What would they look?? Could you give an example??
An example of a weird link would be ANYTHING that you have created yourself. If there was a link to xyexample.net and I hadn’t created that.. I would suspect my security had been breached.
Very useful tip. Recently I found my blog is getting linked to certain unwanted websites.Iam not able to control it.I used to check this in a different way. In google search engine I directly type out my blog name (marinebuzz.com) and see the listings. I find that Iam getting listed in many unwanted sites mostly porn sites. I don’t know how to remove those links. Can anyone give some clue ?
OldSailor’s last blog post..Nuclear Powered Submarine HMS Superb Unsafe to Dive After Rocking
Great tip, just checked and everything seems on the “up and up”.
WordPress Modder’s last blog post..WordPress Modding Music – Episode #2
Thanks for answering Brad
Greatly appreciated
Extremely useful tip indeed! Thanks for the info.
tanya25m’s last blog post..So Many Changes
Sweet tip, Brad. Just checked it out for my blog and it seemed to be all good. Can’t have any porn spammers clogging up my linkage, no sir. Unless they pay.>_><_<
Max Miroff’s last blog post..An Easy Free Backlink With Your Site’s Favicon
Nice tip. Sadly though the Links tab was apparently left out in Firefox 3.0.
Aloha’s last blog post..King Kamehameha Day
I haven’t upgraded to Mozilla 3.0, as 2.5 works great for me.
Is it really that much better?
thanks for your tip. it looks like a little too simple anyway. plus dont forget that in this way you just check your home page. a good indicator is if you page rank goes from X to null!
Web Talk’s last blog post..How to redirect Wordpress feeds to Feedburner feeds
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