7 Warning Signs Your Website Has Been Hacked
Most hacked sites look normal to their owners. Here are the quiet signs that something is wrong, and what to do in the first hour.
Most small-business websites lose rankings to the same handful of fixable problems. Run through this list once a month; it takes about fifteen minutes.
Titles and descriptions
Every page needs a unique title of 30 to 60 characters with its main keyword near the start, and a meta description of 70 to 160 characters that reads like an ad. Duplicates confuse Google about which page to show.
Headings and content
One H1 per page, describing the topic. Pages under 300 words rarely rank; add the detail customers actually ask about: prices, process, service area, FAQs.
Technical basics
- robots.txt exists and does not block important pages
- An XML sitemap is linked from robots.txt
- Every page loads over HTTPS
- No pages return 404 errors from your own menus or posts
- Images have alt text and are compressed
An automated site audit crawls every page and groups these issues by type, so you fix ten pages at once instead of hunting one by one.