ProBlogger Blog Tips - How to Keep Your Blog Hacker, Spammer, and Spyware-free

This guest post is by Sean Sullivan of F-Secure.

It's a notion that strikes fear deep in the heart of every blogger. No, we're not talking about getting dooced (fired for blogging). We're talking about waking up in the morning, loading up your blog, and finding a screen that looks something like this:

The website has been blocked

Or perhaps it wasn't as overt—you just discovered links injected into your site footer containing the anchor text of a certain famed pharmaceutical brand.

In any case, these kinds of scenarios aren’t good news for bloggers. Those fickle web users you work hard to attract can easily be put off by a hacked site and never return. Or, just as bad, being hacked (and not fixing it) risks the search engine equity you've built up over years of blogging, and which is time-consuming to restore.

If your site has been hacked or spammed, you've likely been through the tedious and time-intensive process of combing through MySQL databases, theme files, and directories on your server. If you're lucky, you found the problem, removed it, and got things back up quickly (without having it replicate again, which we've seen). Or perhaps you had a backup copy and completed a restoration process.

But even then, this situation is not ideal. If you're anything like us, you feel it’s unacceptable for your blog to be brought down, even for a moment—and especially by hackers.

The single most important tip? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

In no area other than security is that adage more important. This is simply because hackers, both the automated and the manual kind, choose the path of least resistance.

To a large extent, many are playing the numbers game to try to build black-hat links or manipulate website content for the benefit of helping illegitimate companies rank higher in search engines. To accomplish this, hackers frequently send crawlers...

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