I was reading about TailRank Exposes Massive Number Of Blogs Hacked when it has brought to my attention about your blog being hacked without your knowledge. Some of you might be complaining why your blogs don’t seem to get a ranking from Google. With your blog being hacked quietly, your blog is redirecting your existing force of traffic to another website and that hacker is making money from those affiliated links!
This hacker could be writing an invisible code on the surface which is making your site blacklisted from search engines. He could simply do anything about it so long as it satisfies his excitement or even to make money out of it. I could still vividly remember Carl messaging me that CarlOcab website was hacked out of nowhere. At first, I thought he was joking to me about it as he was telling me casually. Then, it was true and he did some adjustments to his site from then on.
Probably some of the things I would like to highlight when you are protecting your blog from being hacked are the following:
- Keep your passwords harder to crack. The programs such as FTP, your Web Control Panel or Telnet or SSH, and MySQL and your application such as WordPress. These are some of the common things to work on when your website is probably going to be attracting a lot of traffic.
- Keep your WordPress version up-to-date. This is also a very useful prevention because of the security loopholes of the old versions that people have been exploiting. If you keep on using the old version, your website is simply hinting hackers who know about those loopholes.
- Choose a reliable hosting company. While you can take your time to choose the cheapest hosting plans around, it is always good to choose only those reliable ones. Whenever I change my hosting plan, I will try to do some research about this hosting company. Usually those who are friendly to the public by having their own blog, may be a good choice. Having their reputation at stake for what they are doing, it is giving us some assurance too. Find one with a pretty good uptime as well. A company who is managing only a few hosting accounts may not be able to handle huge number of accounts later. Hence, it’s good to choose one who is seasoned at handling huge number of hosting customers. As a bluehost customer myself, I would recommend you to use the same.
- Making Your Domain Name Private. It may be a good choice to make your domain name private since this is not usually used as part of the marketing campaign of your website. Your traffic is mostly concerned about what kind of contents you are holding, and not about you. And if people are finding out about you, probably only a technical guy would do a whois search on you.
Sometimes, it is good to know a bit more about how the Internet works if you are going to do an internet business. Simply leveraging your business on a web designer while you are doing something else is a very big mistake. One should treat a web designer as a partner for their web business needs. That is how a website will prosper and to focus on the needs of the potential customers.
