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Check for Spam Content on Your Website

December 3, 2009

Many website unknowingly contain spam content either in the form of links to spam pages on another website or they may be hosting spam pages. Having spam content on your website can negatively affect user's view of your website, can cause your website rank poorly or be removed from search engines, and it can be sign that your website has been hacked. You can check if search engines have found spam content on your website by doing a search for common spam keywords within in your website. To limit the search results to only your website you need to include "site:example.com", replacing example.com with your website's address, in your search query along with the spam keyword. Some commons spam keywords are: viagra, cialis, sex, OEM, and download. Depending on the topic of your website and the keywords you search for there may be some non spam uses of the keywords on your website.

If your website contains spam content you will need to determine how it got on the website and how to remove it. If you allow unmoderated comments on your website, spammers will likely take advantage of this. Removing the spam comments and moderating future comments will take care of this. The other way that spam content can get into your website is through hacking. A hacker gains entry to website through a security vulnerability and the places the content on the websites. Many times the hacker will hide the content they place on the website so that it is not visible to users visiting the website but is visible to search engines. There are a number of tools that allow you to view hidden text or cloaked content contain on your website. To clean up the spam content you will need to remove the code that adding the spam content to your website and fix the security vulnerabilities so that your website does not get rehacked.


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