Ahem, We Have Just Had A Report Someone Has Broke Into Your Blog

I have been skulking around since mid last week after receiving the news that my wee SEO blog had been hacked. Its difficult to explain the feeling, the best I can pit it against was when the sister-in-law had her house burgled – how she cringed at the thought of an unknown someone traipsing through her stuff. Perhaps some may feel that’s quite a strong similarity to assign a blog hack against – to tell the truth that’s just the tip of my anger – this place is my baby, my business, my livelihood.

In truth my sister-in-law had some support that we webmasters haven’t got. She could inform the Police of the crime that took place – the insurance people helped her refurbish those tainted memories however she soon moved on – never fully comfortable after the incident.

What do we have – not a lot truth be told. I did follow the link to the official Google Webmaster Blog appropriately titled “My site’s been hacked – now what?” There you’ll find the opening line proclaim “All right, you got hacked.” Sorta lays a cold impression on you that one. The info contained within is straight forward to understand – no big, confusing statements - just matter-of-fact ways to minimise the damage – after all it is all about damage control – both with Google (protecting their search results from spam links) and with the webmaster.

Just how scary this all is…

I decided to see what damage is being done at the moment with this spread of hacking blogs. My findings are astonishing. If this continues at this rate then the search results are going to become a complete mess.

Have a look at this search term in yahoo : Click Here!

It returns 95,800 pages. I trawled through the top 10 pages and its not a pretty picture.

The range of the sites hacked are extraordinary – I found the official site of Andy Summers from the pop band The Police fame had fell foul, an Online Security site, Library.ie and a well know CSS design Guru. I could go on and on but its too depressing.

This is a problem, this is a big problem. Wordpress, Google, Yahoo or someone has to look at this – they have to take some form of action to inform these sites of the problem – receiving emails from Technorati don’t mean jack to the majority of these site owners – they have to be told their harvesting spammy links within their premises and be shown how to deal with it.

TBH being a marketer I thought this may be a unique business opportunity – inform those that have been affected, show some comfort and help fix the problem for them at a slight cost but thought better of it. I know how I would feel if someone rapped on my door and broke the news to me then said we can fix it for a price – my hands would be round their neck Homer / Bart style.