Google Webmaster Central Blog just made a very interesting post about a new addition to the Webmasters Tools – a hack and abuse notification system
Wouldn’t it be nice to be notified about the following three things?
- Spammy or abused user-generated content
- Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
- Suspected hacking
Well, if your sites are registered in Google Webmasters Tools then that’s exactly what you’ll be notified about (in Google’s own words) whenever they detects any of the following on your site.
Hacking, comment spam, spammy link profiles and probably other forms of spammy user-generated content on MU-sites and other blogging systems is a pain to have to deal with, so having Google looking out for you is a nice addition to whatever anti-hack and anti-spam system you have in place.
Most blogging software have some sort of anti-comment-spam, for instance Akismet or WP-Spamfree on WP platforms, and the same goes for forum platforms, but what about anti-hack features?
Except for keeping my passwords hard to brute-force crack and keeping WP relatively up-to-date I’m not really doing anything to prevent my site from being hacked, and this is where I think I will benefit the most from this new feature from Google.
It’s not that I expect to be hacked, but it’s nice to know that if I should be targeted then I’ll receive a notification from Google.
