iZachy

Matt Cutts has an interesting post about what Google does when it detects a site has been hacked. Apparently, Google actually sends emails to the addresses listed for the site when Google penalizes a site. I have always assumed Google just penalizes sites without bothering to tell people.

What's even more interesting about the post is the site that Matt blogged about. The site was hacked in the very same way my dad blog was hacked…with the exact same porn links…on the exact same date. It appears a bunch of sites got hacked that day. Lucky for me, I took care of the problem within a couple of days. Otherwise, Google would have penalized my site as well.

In my last post, I mentioned I could not figure out how the hack occurred; I didn't see any modifications to my WordPress templates and disabling all my plugins had no affect. I have since discovered the hack occurred in the index.php file that sits outside of my WordPress directory. I'm telling you guys this in case you encounter the same hack in the future. I'm not going to list the hacked code here. The last thing I want to do is get ranked or penalized for porn stuff. You can see the hack code on Matt's post if you are curious.

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