How To Detect WordPress Redirection Hacks On Your Blog
Friday, June 6th, 2008There’s widespread hacking of WordPress blogs happening where the hacker inserts code into either the .htaccess file, some WordPress core files, or plugin files.
When someone visits your site from Google (and some report Yahoo! as well), the visitor is automatically redirected to the hacker’s website of choice.
Some people are reporting that they’ve lost Google SERPs after being hacked in this manner.
Even though Affiliate Link Checker cannot prevent the hack, it can alert you if your blog has been infected by this hack.
Here’s how you can be alerted:
- Do a search on Google for your blog and locate your entry in the SERPs.
- Right-click on the entry and copy the URL — It will be a Google URL that redirects to your blog.
- Paste that link into Affiliate Link Checker in the “Affiliate URL” text box when you create a new link to monitor.
- Enter your blog’s normal URL in the “Landing Page URL” text box.
- Save the link in Affiliate Link Checker.
- Repeat steps 1-5 with your blog entry in Yahoo! (and any other search engine).
- Also create a link entry with your native blog URL in both the “Affiliate URL” and “Landing Page URL” text boxes — This will catch any redirect hacks that don’t filter on referrer.
Affiliate Link Checker will check those links every day.
If any of them don’t end up displaying your blog to the visitor (i.e., your blog has been hacked and is illegally being redirected somewhere else), you will get an email alert right away.