Google unveils site to help webmasters recover their hacked sites

As the most widely used Internet search engine, Google Search is the de-facto starting point for hundreds of millions of queries each day.

It you are an administrator of a website – and especially if that websites belongs to a business whose success depends on it being always available to customers – one of your primary tasks is to keep it popping up in relevant searches as close as possible to the first page, and to keep it “clean” so that Google doesn’t mark it as potentially compromised and dangerous to users.

In order to do that, you should regularly update your necessary software and remove the unnecessary ones, and you must understand the security practices of all applications, plugins, third-party software, and so on before you install them on your server, advises Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google.

In addition to this, regular, automated backups of your site should be a must, and you should make a consistent effort at keeping the devices you use to access your servers secure, and enforce the creation of strong passwords.

But, if the worst does happen, and your website becomes the (hopefully temporary) home to harmful code, Google has set up a new “Webmasters help for hacked sites” page with videos that will help you regain complete control over it, lock it down against future compromises, and point you towards and explain how you can request a review that should remove the unfavorable note and the block from Google.