Alanis Morissette Hacked – Site is Cloaking Viagra Content
Matt Cutts yesterday blogged about a site belonging to a popular musician that was hit with a hack. The people in charge of the site had reported that they had fixed it, it was then pointed out that the site appeared different to Google than it did to the rest of the world. Using a few keywords Matt used in his blog, it was easy to find the site.
The website of the singer Alanis Morissette has been hit by a hack in a way which all web devs / SEO programmers / server admins should be aware of.
On the face of it, the site looks perfectly fine, which it is to the ordinary user. But the hackers of this particular website have been rather sneaky and have “cloaked” the data they have added so that only Google will see it.
If we spoof our User Agent and pretend that we’re a Google bot, we see something completely different.
Many of the links on this site now direct to the hackers “pharmacy” site.
The site also appears top of Google for the keywords in the title proving Google is seeing this hacked content and is ranking it.
Anybody that is in charge of maintaining a website should regularly check their website using multiple browsers, and using tools to show how the website would appear to Google. I used User Agent Switched Plugin for Firefox for the screenshots on this blog. Google also have tools in Webmaster Tools which allow you to fetch your site as Google.
You should also keep any software on your server or which you are using to build your site, such as Wordpress/Drupal/Joomla, up to date. Make it a regular practise to update your software and you will make it much harder for any potential hackers to gain access to your site. Make good use of Google Webmaster Tools too. They are an extremely valuable resource which is unfortunately overlooked by many website developers.
