14 DAY TRIAL // A lot of malware online is not spread by purposefully malicious sites, but by regular sites that have been taken over by hackers and made to spew out malware, many times without the site owners being any wiser.
Google has a program to notify website owners if they have been infected. But just knowing there is a problem doesn't mean you know how to fix it, especially since you want to keep your site offline for as little as possible.
This is why the search giant is now introducing a centralized place for all security-related alerts and notifications. Called Security Issues, the new tool attempts to be the one-stop-shop in determining whether something is wrong with your site, what the problem is, and how to fix it.
The new tool serves three main purposes. On the one hand, all Google notifications are now displayed in one place.
"Now, when we've detected your site may have been hacked with spam or with malware, we’ll show you everything in the same place for easy reference. Information that was previously available in the Malware section of Webmaster Tools, as well as new information about spam inserted by hackers, is now available in Security Issues," Google explained.
Issues such as malware originating from your site, or spammy content added to some of the pages, are now all listed on the same page.
The new tool also makes it easier to pinpoint the exact problem. Just knowing a site is infected doesn't tell you much, particularly for complex sites. Via Security Issues, webmasters will get exact code snippets from the infected pages, so they'll know exactly where to look.
Finally, once they believe they've cleaned up the site, webmasters can request a review for any of the issues from a single place, with just one click.