Google to "Aggressively Target" Hacked Pages

[enlytend]

In case you need more incentive to keep your site from being hacked, Google is rolling out new algo updates to "aggressively" target hacked spam pages. They are saying it may affect as much as 5% of all queries, which is HUGE (by comparison, the first Penguin update was said to affect only 3.1% of all queries.)

Google Webmaster blog announcement
Story on SearchEngineLand

Hacked pages were always subject to a manual penalty or affecting a site through content or manipulative link penalties, this sounds like it will be much more severe. Hopefully, it will be an easy-reversible penalty that re-evaluates when the site is crawled, not one where you have to wait months for a rollout like Panda/Penguin!

So what should you do?

1) Check your site once in a while !
2) Verify your site with Google Search Console. They will notify you if they notice your site's been hacked (though they're a little slow on the uptake.)
3) Promptly install updates and security patches
4) If you're using a popular CMS, don't use default settings if you can avoid it
5) Use strong passwords
6) Have a good firewall. Use a firewall plugin for Wordpress, limit login attempts, etc.
7) Use well-maintained plugins
8) Unless you know what you're doing and are committed to learning and following best security practices, avoid Joomla. This is a personal observation, based upon the relatively high percentage of Joomla sites that I've seen get hit.

 

[NPer]

How about avoid all CMS.

 

[iowadawg]

How about no sites?

But yes, hacked pages were a pain a few years ago.
Now, not so much with WP (unless you use, as enlytend said, the defaults only).

 

[enlytend]

Could still get hacked with no CMS (just write or use some insecure script). and WP is still vulnerable - especially through plugins. But auto updates were a big step in keeping the core updated (unless the update can't run for resource or permission issues.)

Joomla though - I've seen so many hacked and previously hacked Joomla installs. And the exploits build links to the spam pages from thousands of other hacked Joomla sites so its a total crapfest. We won't talk about the hot mess of duplicate content it lets naive users create for themselves, which is almost as bad as being hacked.

Not picking on it, but it's not for people who don't know what they're doing!