This may seem obvious, but no search engine is going to rank your site well if its bots find spyware, malware, viruses, or any other internet nasties on your website. In fact, if a bot discovers that kind of content, your site will likely be removed from the results and blacklisted.
That sounds simple enough. Most of you probably aren’t planning to host that kind of content anyway, so there’s nothing to worry about, right? Not necessarily. Many websites are hacked, and once that happens, they can become infected with exactly the kind of nasties that search engines—and internet users in general—hate. Even sites with strong security can be compromised without the owner knowing. So you could be happily promoting your site, improving your content, and keeping your SEO in good shape, while your site is quietly infected and only a few steps away from being blacklisted.
There are a few things you can do to help prevent this. The first is obvious but important: visit your site regularly with your anti-virus software running, and check that everything looks okay. Second, you can get a sense of how other people view your site by installing a Firefox Add-On called “Web of Trust”. It displays a ring in one of three colors near the browser menu when you visit a website: green means the website is ‘safe’, orange means ‘doubtful’, and red means ‘avoid this site’. These ratings are user generated, so installing the add-on can help you see whether anyone is reporting problems with your site.
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