Google has announced the launch of a new Webmaster Tools feature called Security Issues, which shows verified site owners info about the security issues on their sites (in a single place), and lets them find problems faster with detailed code snippets and request reviews for all issues in one new process.
Google’s Meenali Rungta and Hadas Fester say in a joint blog post on the Webmaster Central blog, “We know that as a site owner, discovering your site is hacked with spam or malware is stressful, and trying to clean it up under a time constraint can be very challenging. We’ve been working to make recovery even easier and streamline the cleaning process — we notify webmasters when the software they’re running on their site is out of date, and we’ve set up a dedicated help portal for hacked sites with detailed articles explaining each step of the process to recovery, including videos.”
“Now, when we’ve detected your site may have been hacked with spam or with malware, we’ll show you everything in the same place for easy reference,” they say. “Information that was previously available in the Malware section of Webmaster Tools, as well as new information about spam inserted by hackers, is now available in Security Issues. On the Security Issues main page, you’ll see the type of hacking, sample URLs if available, and the date when we last detected the issue.”
Google says that it will try to show webmasters HTML and JavaScript code snippets from the hacked URLs when ever possible, and recommend actions to help clean up the problems.
Feedback about the feature has been overwhelmingly positive so far.