Site Hacking is a real issue. If you are not cautious your business can suffer. A malware infected site is immediately punished by Google. You may have spent years in getting the keywords positioning right but all can vanish overnight. No mercy. I have noted down certain points that can help companies whose sites are hacked.
· Check your website using a free malware scanner everyday! It does not take a minute. We do it everyday using https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/results/intelligentq.co.in
· If there are any malware detected then it will show in the results and also the files that have been infected.
· Take backups every week atleast, better if you have automated backups set-up
· Removing a malware is a tedious task for experts. You never know which part of the code is infected. Therefore it is better to immediately restore the site to the latest un-infected version. It is not an option for large companies because they may have user and financial data that is updated every minute.
· Install the normal security features such as SSL, Website Firewall and monitoring services
· Go for a reputed hosting and not necessarily the cheapest. The better ones have better security
· Your developer should be an expert and know the troubleshooting issues to handle such cases very well. Build a long-term relationship with a great development team.
Incase the site is hacked, do not get worried and follow the steps as given above. It will help the site to get resurrected quickly. This works well for a small to mid-sized company which has limited number of visitors. However, the steps provided above will not be adequate for a large company. They will need a quicker turn-around time of a few hours at max, whereas a smaller company may just afford to have the site down for a couple of days at max.
Also, it needs to be noted that there are different types of hacks’s that can be undertaken by hackers. Since, I am not an expert in this domain I will not get into these. The points discussed above are from a recent experience that a client of mine faced and we were able to put the site right within 36 hours with our development partners. It was related to some malware code being injected into the website. In this case the site lost all rankings by the time the client realized the hack.
There are several signals that your website may have been hacked. Starting from Google Chrome warning, hosting company brining your site down, slower load time, unexpected messages like PHP Deprecated, additional admin users created in the control panel, there are multiple signals to know that the site has been hacked.
The financial costs of a hack activity can be significant. It is more if it a B2C website that has regular visitors buying products at quick intervals. However what is more long drawn is the effect that a hack causes on your Google Ranking. If a hack is not quickly detected and starts affecting your ranking then quarterly revenues can be affected. Incase of larger companies the affect can be in millions.
Small business owners need to take site security very seriously. If you are getting 2 leads a week from organic marketing translating to 8-10 leads per month with a couple of good conversions you stand to lose all of that. Therefore as a precautionary measure, keep a 3 track marketing system ongoing with organic, inorganic (paid) and mailing. Therefore incase if there is a hack and you suffer rankings you still have leads coming from mailing campaign and the paid campaigns.
Once you are done with cleaning the hacked website, it is time to start work on the SEO aspects again to ensure that the site regains its former position in the ranking. As it is getting a ranking on Google takes a great deal of time and effort but when the same is lost we need to put in double the effort to regain the rankings.
If you think that your website is hacked get in touch with us info@intelligentq.co.in
We will work with our development partners to get it resolved quickly.
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