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Learn how to use Google Alerts to monitor your website for hidden hacks.  This 5 minute video could save you weeks of agony.

Have you heard the news about link injections in websites, especially Wordpress, lately?  If not, let me tell you a bit about it.

There is a very common worm going around the Wordpress community lately.  What the worm does is inject a bunch of links into your site.  Usually the links are placed in your footer.  And sometimes those links are especially tricky- they’re hidden.

This is bad for a lot of reasons, but namely they are:

1.  You are most of your site’s linking power to these terrible websites that the links are pointing to.  So you are inadvertantly helping these bad websites sell Viagra, cialus, etc.

2.  Your website may lose it’s rankings as a result.  If your site is inadvertantly pointing links at a ‘bad neighborhood’ as Google puts it, it makes your site look shady (or at least not free of worms).  I’m guessing that Google doesn’t want to send traffic to sites that have worms on them, and they certainly don’t want to rank sites well that link to ‘bad’ websites.

What makes this particular worm especially annoying is that it can sit on your site for weeks or months without anyone noticing.  Unless you check your source code often or are really adept at spotting changes to your site, most people won’t notice that the hidden links are there.

But who wants to check their site’s source code every morning, afternoon, and night to see if you’ve been hacked?  I know I sure don’t.

That’s where Google Alerts comes in.

Just watch the video on this post and you’ll know exactly how to use Google Alerts as your watchdog.  That way, if you site ever gets these links injected, Google Alerts will let you know ASAP.  Pretty cool, huh?  And best of all… it’s free!

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