A lot happens on your web server that you don’t know about. I just checked my server logs and saw many many entries of attempted access to the following areas of my site;
www.shanemcdonald.org/administrator
www.shanemcdonald.org/control-panel
www.shanemcdonald.org/CMS
These pages don’t exist and never existed so I think these are probably hackers were trying to find out a way into the site. If you have coded your site yourself you should be aware that some attempts may be made as part of an SQL Injection or Brute Force attack on your system.
The IPs on this occasion were from Norway, Russia, Ukraine, USA and a few Asian IPs.
It is through the error log (one of the many server logs recorded by your site) that I could see these items. I actually blocked one IP Address because there were so many attempted accesses from that IP. By sealing off all potential acces points you can protect your website.
Also, check your PHP code – ensure you don’t automatically register variables, check all form submissions and anything that interacts with your database.
I have seen some websites out there (businesses) which have body text, and slap bang in the middle of the text links to Crack websites or Adult sites. I believe these sites have been compromised by poorly secured web servers (of which I have had a few) and poorly coded websites which have PHP or asp code.
Since I moved web servers I have been trying to bring the site back up the Google rankings and also re-develop the site, mainly since I had not added much to the site in the past few months.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes after 20th April (when I made the changes in line with the Google Webmaster Guidelines) to get re-listed highly on the world most popular Search Engine.
This is an old post which was originally on my old shanemcdonald.org site and now resides here on
