I have had two WordPress blogs hacked into in the past. That was at a time when I was doing very little internet marketing, and until I found time to address the situation (months later), these sites were penalised in the search engines. They were not removed, but the rankings were reduced.
The secure your wordpress site Codex has an outline of what permissions are okay. Directory and file permissions can be changed through an FTP client or within the page from your web host.
Do not depend on your internet host - Many men and women rely on their web host to"do all that technical stuff for me", not realizing that sometimesthey do browse this site not! Far better to have the responsibility lie with you, rather than out.
Exclude pages - This plugin provides a checkbox,"include this page in menus", here are the findings which can be checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page won't appear in any listings of webpages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your webpage navigation menus).
Another step to take to make WordPress more secure is to upgrade WordPress. The reason behind this is that there come fixes for older security holes making it essential to upgrade early.
I prefer using a WordPress plugin to get the work done. Just make sure the plugin you select is in a position to do backups, has restore functionality, and can clone. Also be sure that it is often updated to keep pace with all versions of WordPress. There is no use in backing up your data to a plugin that is out of date, and not functioning.