The real threat of SEO hackers

When I think of Hackers, I think of that mid 90’s cult movie starring Angelina Jolie and some other unknown actor that clearly didn’t make it in the industry. I have seen it numerous times and because of this my perception of hacking involves American secret services, floppy disks and roller blades. However, hacking is a major problem and hackers can be a big deal even in the world of SEO.

In light of the recent Twitter hackings at the end of last year, I decided to look at the world of hacking and see if it was just as serious a problem in SEO as it is in say, the social media networking sector. We are constantly seeing Facebook comments saying something ridiculous like “look at this pic of you!” These account hackings were rife last year and many of us had no clue why we were getting all these spammy comments about pictures we did not know we had. As word spread, we began to wise up to the social networking hacking and most of us now send a friendly to the victim saying something along the lines of “dude, you have been hacked.”

I came across a term simply known as “SEO poisoning attack.” Basically, poisoning attack is the hacking of a site by the use of XSS or cross server scripting. This form of hacking “attacks” are seen as highly advanced and complex and are extensive within the world of SEO and how it works seems just as complicated. The hacker includes a script and this script says something along the line of “if the incoming user agent = googlebot, etc. SEND THEM here. If it’s not, display that site.” This hacking will result in your SEO results being shown up as spam or pornographic links to other sites. If this happens to your site, Google will index your info as those links and basically all of your SEO will be directed to something totally different, and most of the time, nasty. The promotion of these other sites will result in their rankings improving, which might be a very bad thing if the links are porn related.

By doing this, the hackers use your own back links for their own advantage whilst Google indexes the spam and undesirable sites that the hackers include. These attacks seem to be growing on a daily basis and there is not much one can do to stop the spread of these SEO poisoning attacks. The best way to avoid these hackings by prevention so try and stay away from anything spammy and make sure your website is not vulnerable in anyway.