Don’t Get Hacked:
Google Bot Trick!
Google Bot Trick!
Justin’s blog was hacked and he didn’t notice for a while. Why not? The hack made blog look normal to everyone except Google. This caused Justin’s blog for dropping out of Google’s index- which results in a major loss of traffic.
If this happened to Justin, you can bet it could happen to you! Luckily there are steps you can take to could protect yourself both from getting hacked, or failing that, at least discover if you have fallen victim of this sneaky hack!
How to protect yourself
- Periodically change passwords you use to access by FTP. This is generally done at the account web host gives you. If you don’t know how to do this, ask your host!
- Protect your wp-admin area using htaccess. Hacking into wp-admin is a common tactic. I discussed the steps you can take to protect that area of your blog in Blog Security: htaccess block.
- Periodically look at your pages through Google’s eyes:
- Install the FireFox User Agent Switcher
- Create a Googlebot user agent.
Do this buy pulling down “Tools” -> User Agent Switer ->Options ->Options.
Next click “User Agents” then “add”.
An entry box will appear. Enter Googlebot 2.1 for “Description” and “User Agent”. Don’t worry about the other boxes; leave them blank.
Save these settings. - Switch to the Googlebot user agent by selecting “Tools->User Agent Switcher”. You’ll now see “Google bot 2.1″. Select that.
- Turn off BadBehavior (or the next step will fail.)
- View your blog. If should look the same when viewed with the Googlebot user agent and when viewed normally. If you see something horrible, you have been hacked. (Sorry, I don’t tell you how to fix that here. The ‘fix’ will depend on precisely what the hacker modified. )
- Reactivate BadBehavior (to protect you from malicious ‘bots.
- Head on back to “Tools->User Agent Switcher” and pick “default”.
- Back up everything: Just in case protecting your ftp and wp-admin areas fails, be sure to periodically back up your blog templates, database, and Wordpress files (including images etc.) Backing up won’t prevent you from being hacked, but it lets you recover if someone does hack you. I back up my database daily using WordPress Database Backup.
I back up the whole blog by saving the entire domain as a zip file and emailing to myself from time to time. (No, not every day.)
Hey, it’s Saturday. That’s as good a time to back up as any. Good luck and safe blogging!
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