How To Defend Against Porn Link Injection

I wrote a post yesterday about how PocketSEO.com was hacked. This site has been heavily penalized because cloaked, hidden porn links were being injected into the site through a WordPress backdoor.

I’ve seen this happen many times to EDU and other sites. “Hackers” break into the sites and put hidden links to networks of porn sites. I even saw one EDU site that had porn links all over the home page. Those links pointed at pages about porn on other hacked trusted sites, which then pointed to or redirected to porn affiliate links. Some of the pages would try to install malware.

Here is a way to protect this from happening to your site and your clients’ sites:

Google Alerts

Go to Google Alerts and you will see a form like the one below:

Fill in the form with the following data, replacing example.com with your domain name:

Search terms: site:example.com porn
Type: Comprehensive
How often: once a day
Your email: [your email address]

That tells Google to send you an email whenever they see the word porn on your site. You can also setup alerts for related spammy keywords like ringtones.

I’ve tested this since being penalized and it works. Google has sent me an email telling me that there is porn content on this site that I can’t see:

I recommend setting this up for all of your sites and your client sites.

Here are some examples of otherwise trusted sites that have fallen victim to this problem — warning: the following links to Google search results pages contain explicit porn keywords:

• MexicoCity.com.mx — Google says “This site may harm your computer.”
• Harvard.edu
• General hacked EDU sites

Keep Your Software Updated

This blog was hacked because I was running WordPress 2.1.3 until yesterday (now running the latest 2.3.3). There were some security holes in it. I didn’t upgrade, because WordPress releases new versions so fast that it’s difficult to keep up when you have a lot of sites. I didn’t think it would happen to me… but I’m going to keep updated with the latest versions of WordPress from now on.

I hope this post helps other people avoid getting penalized in Google because of injected porn links.

UPDATE: 23 Mar 08: Watch out for a new WordPress exploit for 2.3.3