Diagnose Your Website, Detect Malware, Crawl Errors With Google Webmaster Diagnostics Tools

aster Diagnostics Tool” title=”Prevent Malware with Google Webmaster Diagnostics Tool” width=”248″ height=”191″ class=”alignright size-full wp-image-2182″ />Google Webmaster has various set of tools which can help you detect and prevent any malware and even a hacker attack. Google can detect whether your site has been compromised or hacked. There are notifications settings also available so whenever google detects such issue it can notify you immediately. If someone (hacker) inserted malware into your site, google identifies your site as infected in their search results to protect other users too.

In this article, I will describe you how you can protect your site by using such an awesome set of Google WebMaster Diagnostics tools.

There are five different set of tools provided by Google Webmaster Diagnostics tools:

1. Malware
2. Crawl Errors
3. Crawl Stats
4. Fetch as Googlebot
5. HTML Suggestions

Prerequisite:
The very first step is to signup for google webmaster service and add your website.

1. Detect malware attacks

The more the popular site you have, the chances of getting infected with malware, hackers attacks increases. If your site has been infected with malware, the Malware page in Webmaster Tools under Diagnostics will list sample URLs from your site that have been identified as infected and containing malicious code. You can immediately take action to remove the malware code from your website. You would need to remove the page from the google search as well.

Once you’re done with removing malicious code from your website, you can request a malware review of your site. Google can check your site and, if no malware is detected, it will remove the warning label that appears in your site’s listing on the search results page. You can do it manually too by following the below steps:

• On the Webmaster Tools Home page, select the site you added.
• Click Diagnostics, and then click Malware.
• Click Request a review.

2. Detect crawl errors

This tool detects errors with your website which came during crawling by google bot. It can detect the erros such as HTTP erros 404, 403, 502 etc. It can also tell you which are the links completely dead and not accesible. It detects three types of erros:

1. HTTP – Forbidden(403), Bad Request(400), Request Timeout(408) and various other client erros
2. Not found – 404 errors
3. Restricted by robots.txt

You can also export all these list of data in the CSV format in one click. Click on the “Download all errors on this site” button in the “Crawl Erros” section under Diagnostics.

3. Review crawl stats

View your crawl stats graphically in the “Crawl stats” section under Diagnostics. Google provides three types of stats with “High”, “Average” and “Low” figures of last 90 days:

1. Pages crawled per day
2. Kilobytes downloaded per day
3. Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)

These stats helps you to identify how the google is crawling your website and its pages.

4. Fetch as Googlebot

This tool lets you to see exactly how a page appears to Google. If you suspect a page is infected, you can use this tool to detect what Googlebot crawler will see. This tool is very useful to detect malware that might be hidden from the users’ browsers, but served to Google’s search engine crawler.

5. HTML Suggestions

This is one of my favorite tool out of all awesome tools avaialble in Google Webamaster. This tool helps you identify the issues with your website’s HTML code such as:

• Missing Meta Description
• Missing Title Tags
• Duplicate Title Tags
• Long Title Tags
• Non-Informative Title Tags
• Non-Indexable Content

It can detect such common issues which may help you to address your site’s user experience, performance and SEO.

There are other sets of tools also available in Google Webmaster which are really focused in improving your site’s overall experience. The article has come out of my recent experience I had with the diagnostics tool when one of my website got malware attack. What will be the first thing you would do if you detect that your website is compromised with malware attacks? Please share your experience in comments below.

I hope that the above re-search will also help you to prevent such attacks for your websites.

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