Google reports a 32% increase in number of sites hacked

[The Buzz]

A post from earlier this week on the Google Webmaster Central Blog reports that they have seen an increase in the number of hacked sites by approximately 32% in 2016 compared to 2015, a trend they don't expect to "slow down."

As hackers get more aggressive and more sites become outdated, hackers will continue to capitalize by infecting more sites.

On the bright side, 84% webmasters who do apply for reconsideration are successful in cleaning their sites. However, 61% of webmasters who were hacked never received a notification from Google that their site was infected because their sites weren't verified in Search Console. Remember to register for Search Console if you own or manage a site. It’s the primary channel that Google uses to communicate site health alerts.

The post goes on to list links to new documentation to give webmasters more context when their site has been compromised.

We’ve been listening to your feedback to better understand how we can help webmasters with security issues. One of the top requests was easier to understand documentation about hacked sites. As a result we’ve been hard at work to make our documentation more useful . . . Next, we created clean up guides for sites affected by known hacks. We’ve noticed that sites often get affected in similar ways when hacked. By investigating the similarities, we were able to create clean up guides for specific known type of hack.

Read more here: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/20...in-review.html

[MrAJ]

I'm always wondering why Google knows about sites being hacked and still ranks the hacked subdirectories high in SERPs?

[sweetbet]

Excellent point. It makes you wonder.

[Miles_Videoslots]

Is it the Thrill they get from beating the system ? That gets a Hackers Blood flowing ? I get why a Hacker wants to get into a Federal or a Financial site where they can gain some financial reward for there efforts but besides the thrill and adrenaline that comes with hacking what can they gain by hacking into a mundane day to day site that has no emails or financial information stored ?

[Mattbar]

Is it the Thrill they get from beating the system ? That gets a Hackers Blood flowing ?

I ask this myself a lot, what motivates them, I think a lot of the time it is sheer anarchism.

Maybe taking down a small site may be more fun for them as the risk of prosecution does not exist.