So… let’s talk about spam Links and malware on my website. By ‘my’, I mean yours!
How to protect your website from hackers, first, what are spam links? This is when a hacker gets access to your website and dumps a lot of posts that link you to blacklisted websites. Some link to gambling and some link to porn. It not only destroys the integrity of your website, it also gets your website in trouble.
What kind of trouble?
- Google can blacklist your website as dangerous and poof, bye-bye, ranking.
- You can get arrested if the websites it links to are illegal or involve terrorism. The police may contact you about it and depending on the grace of GOD in your life. You may find yourself facing a terrorism charge.
- You lose Domain Authority, this is what tells google your website can be trusted. You cannot lose this!
There are more but these are the most troublesome to me… let’s get back to the point of this post. Using my website as an example, I will explain what happened when I got infected (my website is now super secure, don’t sweat it). I own a blog called https://elistatus.com and I have owned it for many years. It may not be the most successful blog out there but it is my baby.
Last week I was checking on backlinks that lead to my website, what was the most popular, and what was the least popular when I noticed that my website had a page I never created dedicated to gambling. I was shocked! (You can click here to learn how to check backlinks on your website). I logged in as an admin and those pages were no longer visible, these hackers had hidden them so I would be unable to view them!
It frustrated me to no end, so I decided that no matter what. I would get rid of these pages once-and-for-all, I opened the bad link in an incognito window (using chrome). I clicked on inspect to see if I could find the source of the link injection and found it was from my theme. I was mad, I logged in to Cpanel and deleted the theme from the back end. I had expected four or five bad links but I was met with over a thousand of them. It was horrible.
I wanted to scream out in frustration and anger. I had to use site lock to secure my site, scan for malware, and remove viruses. Then I had to manually delete these intrusions myself.
So here are some tips on how you can secure your WordPress website, between You and Me. You can share this post but only with good people, not with the terrible hackers that messed up my WHOLE day.
I would suggest getting professional help from an expert, like me. However, if you have to do it yourself then these tips can help.
Check the backlinks for your website here: https://www.seoreviewtools.com/valuable-backlinks-checker/
Tips on how to secure your website.
- Limit Login attempts: Why would you leave the attempts unlimited? Do you want the hackers to keep trying their luck? I set my login attempts to 3 and after that, it’s a 48-hour lockout.
- Cloudflare: I cannot sing Cloudflare’s praises enough when it comes to blocking bots.
- Hide your WP-ADMIN page, never show hackers or anyone you do not trust your login link.
- Install a strong firewall.
- Install a malware remover or use sitelock.