Those who are experienced in website development and SEO know that when a website gets a virus, it will be deindexed (or at best lowered in rankings) if the virus remains for a long time, or, if the issue is transient, then new pages will no longer be indexed. Of course, search engines will forgive you when your website becomes clean again, but forgiveness sometimes can take a long time especially if you don’t fix the issue in a timely manner.
So, how do you know that your Joomla website is virus free?
Well, the first thing to do is to run online virus scans regularly on your website. There are many free tools on the Internet for doing this, AVG has one and there’s another one called Virus Total (we haven’t used the latter though, and that’s why we’re not linking to it).
Now if you have some very basic programming/system administration knowledge, you can do the following:
– Launch your website and click on “View Page Source” (in Firefox) and see if you can find any alien code. This “alien code” is usually JavaScript code in a hash format.
– Check your .htaccess file for malicious redirects (see here for a case of a hacked .htaccess file). If you find some weird code then revert to a backup file immediately or contact us and we’ll get this solved for you.
– Open index.php in the root folder of your website (through FTP or sFTP or FTPs) to see if there’s some malicious code inserted into the file.
– Do the same for all your template files (all the .php files located in your template directory).
It’s very important to do the above steps regularly, say once a week, and to keep your Joomla website always up-to-date. If you find a virus on your website, then call us instead of trying to remove it by yourself (in many cases the virus is present in different forms on the website and in different places). We’ll fix it for you, promise!