Most people follow ethical SEO practices, creating content that’s great for the users and easy to crawl for the search engines. The ones who want to cheat the system will try to exploit Google ranking algorithms to get a lot of traffic but risk penalty from the search engine.
If you do SEO the right way and achieve success, the odds are someone will try to take advantage of your site. Either to bring you down or to use your site’s success to fuel their schemes. That’s why site protection from SEO fraud is so important for successful businesses.
This article will explain what SEO fraud is and what steps you can take to protect yourself from it.
What is SEO and SEO Poisoning?
Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing your website to appear for more searches, rank higher, and, ultimately, receive more organic search traffic. The basic practices of SEO include improving the technical health of a website, optimizing pages for the right keywords, and earning backlinks from reputable websites.
Those are well-established best practices that can improve the SEO of legitimate businesses over a long time. Unfortunately, like in most other industries, there are practitioners who want to cut corners and do things unethically. This is where SEO fraud, SEO poisoning, or black hat SEO comes from.
Some of these practices are aimed at bringing your website down in ranking. To do this, malicious actors can flood your site with spammy, low-quality links to make it look like you’re breaking Google guidelines.
Others will try to take advantage of your site to boost their own projects, typically illegal or shady. This can mean hijacking access to your website to post thousands of backlinks from your site or redirecting traffic to their sites.
The worst type of SEO scams are malicious actors getting access to your site to steal or tamper with customer data. The first two types of fraud can only hurt your site’s ranking and can be averted if spotted. This can lead to your customers losing money or getting their identities stolen if you don’t take steps to prevent this.
7 Best Practices to Protect Your Site From SEO Scams
The most widespread SEO poisoning tactics have been well-known for a long time, and so are the best practices for preventing them from taking place on your site. Here are the seven things you need to implement.
Use GSC Alerts and Reports
The first thing you’ll have to do is set up Google Seach Console alerts for the results of SEO scams — sudden drops in traffic, keyword ranking, bounce rate, or other important metrics. When you get notified about that right as it happens, it gives you ample time to investigate and react.
You should also pay attention to two GSC reports: the Security Issues report and the Manual Actions report.
The Security Issues report will highlight potential malicious actions on your site, such as code injection, content injection, or links to malicious websites.
The Manual Actions report will show whether there’s been a manual action against your site or page. This happens when you break Google’s guidelines. In this case, this means either someone is using your site to post spammy links or points spammy links to your site.
Step one can help you catch SEO fraud issues before it’s too late. In the case of catching the problem in the Manual Actions report, it’ll take work to remove the action.
The next steps will focus on preventing these issues from happening in the first place.
Maintain Technical Health and Security
Most website hacks happen because of poor security practices. If your HTTPS certificate has expired or you’re using an old version of a plugin with security issues, you’re much more likely to suffer SEO poisoning attacks. Keeping those elements updated is a large part of website security.
To stay on top of things, run a technical site audit frequently to assess weak points, such as an SSL certificate that’s close to expiring. Run the report quarterly or monthly.
Invest in Reliable Hosting & Servers
Choosing a reliable hosting doesn’t just ensure optimal uptime and good loading speed, it can be a factor in website security.
A good professional hosting will have systems in place to prevent and mitigate distributed denial of service attacks. A free untrustworthy hosting might be hacked easily, which makes any sites hosted on it easy targets for an attack.
Google experimented with IP-level action in the past, where sites hosted on IP addresses frequently used for spam would be hurt in rankings. Google representatives say they don’t do it anymore, but many SEO professionals still try to avoid hosting on shared untrustworthy IPs to be on the safe side.
Perform Regular SEO Analysis
You’re likely to perform an SEO analysis with some regularity already. It’s a necessary part of SEO workflow that lets you see the bigger picture of your wins and failures in SEO strategy implementation. Looking at certain parts of it also lets you catch SEO scams.
You’re looking for sudden unexplained changes in performance. A drop in ranking that can’t be explained by actions of competitors, a drop in organic traffic, or an increase in bounce rate. Analytical reports are great for catching those drops stretched over time.
GSC alerts will tell you when it’s happening suddenly most of the time. Use SEO analytics to investigate whether it’s a result of malicious actions or a natural occurrence.
Monitor Your Link Profile
An influx of poor-quality spammy links pointing to your website can result in a manual action against it, as Google might believe you’re engaging in black hat SEO tactics. The best way to catch that early and counteract it is to regularly monitor your link profile.
Getting one or two spammy links per day is inevitable, but if you see dozens or more similar spammy links to your site, it’s a cause for concern.
Google guidelines suggest not to disavow them as search engine’s system can recognize these types of links and disregard them. Many SEO specialists prefer to disavow them anyways just to be on the safe side.
Use Anti-Malware Tools
If malware is injected into your site, it’s likely to spread to your users. To prevent this, do regular malware scans. The are multiple tools for this, including plug-ins for WordPress.
They can detect malware that’s illegally hosted on your site, but won’t detect other types of SEO poisoning.
Back-Up Your Site
Finally, creating and regularly updating a backup of your site is the best way to safeguard it and its users from a malicious attack. Whether it’s ransomware or phishing attempts, you can restore a safe version of your site. You can also move your site temporarily if you’re experiencing a large-scale DDoS attack.
This won’t help with people stealing your content or spamming your site with links, though.
Popular Negative SEO Attacks to Be Aware of
There are a few types of SEO poisoning attacks. Knowing more about them helps you detect and prevent them.
SEO Spam
This is the most widespread type of SEO poisoning. It might take forms like these:
- Spamming your site with low-quality links.
- Placing unwanted outgoing links on your site.
- Placing unwanted content on your site.
You can protect yourself from the first one by monitoring the link profile of your site and disavowing malicious links.
The other two can be mitigated by keeping your website secure.
Content Scraping
If your content ranks high in SERP, the odds are that many untrustworthy websites will steal your articles to repost. This is the primary source of suspicious links you sometimes see, as few webmasters of that sort will bother to delete internal links before posting.
It doesn’t directly lead to SEO poisoning, though. If they scrape your database of copyrighted pictures or files, or even worse, scrape your whole website to pretend to be you online, it can present a problem.
You can’t fully prevent this as there are too many web scraping tools and people who want to steal content online.
The best thing you can do is limit the number of requests users might make in any given timeframe and add a Captcha for users who exhibit suspicious activity. Monitoring website logs and restricting activity from suspicious user agents works too.
If you find stolen content on the web, file a DMCA complaint to get it taken down.
Site Hacking
Around 30,000 sites are hacked a day, and most victims might not even know it. When attackers get access to your admin panel, they’ll likely use it to place backlinks, post content, or pop-up ads they try to cover up from you. This way, they try to either promote their illegal business or steal customer data.
To prevent this, make sure you’re using updated versions of all software that’s hosted on the site and take the right security measures for your login credentials. This mostly means using a secure password with two-factor verification enabled and reading up on phishing prevention.
To detect this, use GSC Security Issues Report and malware scanners.
False Info Spreading
The relative anonymity of the internet is a beautiful thing, but it can be used for bad things, too. There’s little you can do if somebody starts posting fake negative reviews or blog posts about your business.
The best tactic is to respond calmly but assertively to negative feedback on platforms where you get a say like Google Business Profiles or review sites. If you see that there’s a widespread campaign against you, stay ahead and notify your subscribers about it.
DDoS Attacks
DDoS attacks can happen to avert visitors, get a ransom from you, or mask hacking attempts. You can detect it by longer loading times and increased server errors.
To mitigate it, pick a trustworthy host that can help you apply a firewall and manage traffic loads.
Summary
SEO poisoning and cyber attacks can bring your website down in rankings, potentially result in manual actions from Google, and compromise user data to malicious agents. There are multiple ways your website can be hurt, and there are multiple ways to protect it.
Protect your website from SEO poisoning and cyber threats by monitoring site health, securing hosting, and leveraging DuoCircle for enhanced email security.
Monitor website health and look for changes in main SEO metrics. Check Google’s security reports, choose a good hosting, and do a regular website backup. Diagnose the issues and take the necessary steps to solve them.