How the search engine giant handles hacked webpages

Dec 4, 2006 14:05 GMT  ·  By

Google is a company that tries to keep Google Search very clean and to offer its users useful results without porn or other illegal stuff. One of the most important elements that Google wants to get rid of is represented by the hacked websites that usually contain text and other files related to illegal content. That's why the company is blocking every site detected as being hacked and is removing it from Google's index.

Today, Matt Cutts - Google engineer - posted a message on his blog to present the story of a web developer that was banned by Google because his website was hacked. After he observed the webpage was removed from the index, he published an article to attack the company and their services because he thinks their policy is not right to all users.

"Each site owner is responsible for making sure that their site isn't spammy. If you pick a bad search engine optimizer (SEO) and they make a ton of spammy doorway pages on your domain, Google still needs to take action. Hacked sites are no different: lots of spammy/hacked sites will try to install malware on users' computers.

If your site is hacked and turns spammy, Google may need to remove your site, but we will also try to alert you via our webmaster console and even by emailing you to let you know what happened. To the best of my knowledge, no other search engine confirms any penalties to sites, nor do they email site owners," Matt said.

"Could Google do a better job? Absolutely, and we'll keep working on it. For example, maybe we can show a more specific message for hacked sites in the webmaster console. Google could also try to identify better email addresses when writing to site owners," he concluded.