The Guardian reports that bloggers are fighting back against people who use their sites to subvert search engine rankings or to host malware.

Barry Welford considers himself lucky. The weekend he decided one of his blogs, Staygolinks.com, needed a cleanup was the same time a hacker chose to splatter the site with a host of unwanted pages.

“I was doing something I don’t normally do: changing the theme of the blog. But it turned out that it was just after the hacker had got in,” says Welford.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, says: “We are seeing more and more websites becoming infected. We count 16,000 new malicious web pages every day. It’s one every five seconds. And 90% of them are on legitimate sites that have been hacked.”

This trend is definitely an emerging market, as Richard Archdeacon, at Symantic security practice suggests. Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s WebSpam team has predicted that;

2008 will be the year that hacking and search engine optimization (SEO) collide in a major way. By the end of the year, a nontrivial fraction of blackhat SEO will involve illegally hacking sites for links or landing pages.

So the threat is a serious one, what is the best advice bloggers can get? The solution is in two key areas, ensuring your software is up to date and setting in place early warning systems.

A big problem for bloggers is working out when their site has been compromised. Hackers do a lot to cover their tracks. “They want to keep it running, so they want to avoid being a blip on the radar,” Archdeacon says. The first sign may be when Google removes a blog from its pages or warns that visiting a site may damage your computer.

This is the exact situation where SERPGuard can help, by providing email and RSS alerts the moment your site is flagged by Google. As Archdeacon suggests, the first sign something is wrong can be when you notice the warnings in Google’s listings or have them pointed out to you by a visitor. By ensuring alerts can be sent via a service like SERPGuard, you will be one step ahead.

There are other tools available, such as iWatch and Tripwire but as David Kierznowski, security consultant and founder of Blogsecurity.net, suggests in the article these can be overkill for most blogs. Setting up alerts at Google Webmaster Central, SERPGuard and even Google Alerts on keyword terms can offer you protection with little effort.

Technorati Tags: Barry Welford, Blogsecurity.net, David Kierznowski, Google, Graham Cluley, Malware, Matt Cutts, Phishing, Richard Archdeacon, Sophos, Symantec, The Guardian