Matt Cutts, the Spam Czar over at Google, had a blog post about what happens when a site gets hacked.

In summary, a site owner had his site hacked and a bunch of animal porn (note: that is animal porn, not midget porn, for those of you scoring at home … er, I mean …) was placed on his site. It took Google about ten days to detect the spam and then delist the site. Of course, the site owner, publicly whined about the deindexing, claiming he never received the warning email from Google and is basically passing blame.

Matt has gone above and beyond with this – which on one hand is commendable, but on the other, the site owner has to bear some responsibility.

1) The site is hosted on a Windows server. Now, I used to have a Windows server to do testing on, but junked it because of all of the hacking attempts. It got to the point where I was spending more time defending the server than doing testing. Cancelling that server was one of the best stress relievers of my life.

2) The server did not have a full-time admin. Why it is people want to have a successful business online, but are unwilling to protect the asset they are building? Geez. I mean, we aren’t talking about spending $10,000 here. Just give $100 over to the server admins that we use and you won’t have to worry about your server again. It is a no brainer.

3) Have your email setup so you can actually receive email when people are trying to contact you.

4) If your site gets hacked, that is your fault. If your site is deindexed by Google because it was hacked and you had a bunch of porn spam posted on your site. That’s your fault too.

Take some responsibility. Get a good server, a great admin and something like this won’t happen again.

Nice job Matt. Not only was it a classy move – but it was good PR for Google too.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.