According to Google, there has been a 180 percent increase in the number of sites being hacked so far in 2015. While this has pushed Google to focus on developing ways to help prevent hacking in the first place, it has also sparked a few noteworthy changes to its reconsideration process in order to make “recovering from a hack faster and easier” for webmasters.
The following is a look at three features Google has implemented to this end, along with the impacts these features are already having.
Google Features to Facilitate the Recovery from Hacks: Important Info for Webmasters
1 – The “Note from Your Reviewer” Feature
Intended to improve communications between webmasters and Google, this feature provides customized notes with “advice tailored to each case in response to a reconsideration request.” The idea is to provide details about where and how webmasters can locate any remaining hacked content on their site that is preventing their reconsideration request from being accepted.
According to Google, since this feature was rolled out last year, close to 3 in every 4 rejected reconsideration requests have been supplemented with a customized note from Google regarding how to overcome the rejection. This has led to a nearly 30 percent decrease in the amount of time needed to clean up hacked sites and have manual actions removed, Google has noted.
2 – The “Hacked Sites Troubleshooter” Feature
Now available in 23 languages, the Hacked Sites Troubleshooter provides “some basic steps to recover from a hack.” The intent is to point webmasters to the issues that commonly need to be resolved in recovering from a hack, particularly those that are not typically visible to the everyday user but are apparent to search engine crawlers.
As part of this feature, Google is also reportedly beta testing an automated feature that could “automatically remove” certain manual actions against a site when its systems detect that hacked content has been rectified or removed from a site. Although Google still recommends that webmasters submit reconsideration requests, this automated feature may come into wider use in the near future.
3 – The feedback loop
Though not a formal feature Google has developed, the feedback loop is something that is reportedly continuing to drive Google’s focus on addressing hacked sites and related reconsideration requests.
In fact, as Google has noted, the feedback it has already received from webmasters has been used to develop the above-discussed features, as the main problems identified by webmasters in their feedback have been not being appropriately alerted to a site hack, as well as a lack of guidance on how to recover from hacks.
It will be interesting to see how Google continues to implement comments from the feedback loop in improving support for webmasters. As more updates regarding Google’s hack recovery features become available, we’ll report the latest updates to you here in a future blog.
Until them, post your opinions and comments about these features and Google’s efforts on our Facebook & Google+ pages.
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