Are your search results beginning to look a lot like a pharmacy?… or maybe a casino, or a discount fashion store?
Dirty SEO is a parasitic infection that takes advantage of your website by injecting it with unwanted links and keywords. The resulting web spam damages your brand’s reputation and leads to your website being blocklisted by search engines. It’s not enough to simply remove the infection from your website. You have to diagnose the problem, remove the infection and ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Repair Your Affected SEOSearch Engine Poisoning (SEP) attacks are a Blackhat technique employed by crackers (a.k.a Hackers) to abuse and otherwise take advantage of your rankings on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). The business of Blackhat SEO is a lucrative business, generating millions of dollars a year to the would-be crackers. These SEP attacks lead to what is known as Dirty Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
It’s a method employed by attackers, allowing them to leverage your ranking to divert good legitimate traffic to their various sources. It reduces the time and overhead required to work on SEO best-practices and to build out the necessary infrastructure and audience, but it comes at the price of web spam penalties.
At Sucuri we specialize in SEP attacks, specifically in the repair and removal of Dirty SEO. Dirty SEO cases make up a healthy percentage of the type of infections we deal with on a daily basis. Fortunately for you, we know all of their dirty tricks and write about them continuously. The power of our process comes from years of experience, allowing us to build the best technology for detection and repair. We focus on eradicating all traces of SEO spam and when we’re done, if needed, we’ll proceed with submitting your website to the proper authority to remove any potential blocklists.
SEO poisoning is an act employed by Blackhat attackers to insert links and keywords into your Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). Attackers can link to their own websites or those of their clients, and in the process they divert your traffic to their properties, increasing ranking, followers, and revenue by leveraging all your hard work.
These hackers let themselves in, abusing your PageRank in whatever way they see fit. There are many ways they can corrupt your SEO:
The first big case of SEO Poisoning became known as the Pharma hack. Keywords stuffed into your website are often linked to commercial medications, but this isn’t always the case. The target keywords can be anything at all, and often have nothing to do with your site. These link-juice-stealing hacks can raid websites for their most potent pages, allowing them to generate backlinks for anyone willing to pay money for Blackhat SEO. With the help of their evil spambots, hackers use SEO tools, blog searches, and vulnerability-seeking scripts to corrupt innocent websites.
In the end, your website and hundreds like it create what is known as a link farm. For every link hidden on your site, the crackers gets a penny in their pocket. It’s a small win for them, but it leaves your entire web presence at risk of being blocklisted with a red Google alert page, letting everyone know that your site is serving web spam. Though you can recover, it’s difficult to win back the trust of visitors and overcome the embarrassment of appearing to promote the use of Cialis and Levitra.
The effects of SEO Poisoning can be catastrophic to your brand. The impacts will often manifest in a number of ways:
When your traffic is at stake, you want a solution that can restore your website quickly. The dirty search terms are not only embarrassing, but they make visitors feel unsafe knowing that your website was probably hacked. With our global team of security professionals we are able to respond quickly, when you need us most. Our dedicated experts work around-the-clock, resulting in response times that are consistently rated faster than our competition, with better results.
Being one of the most popular infections around, Sucuri has developed a keen and effective approach to addressing infected SEO. To clean your website, we connect via FTP or SSH and use the latest research from our lab to perform a deep analysis of the application server, database, and software environment.
Our research lab spends countless time and resources to better understand the techniques being employed by Blackhats, and to develop new tools to combat their effects. We use advanced heuristic analysis to flag new and emerging threats for immediate investigation.
During the cleanup, Sucuri automatically creates quarantined backups of all modified files. Our technicians provide you with a complete report of what was found. Once the website is clean, we submit a review with third-party blocklists, and submit requests with the appropriate blocklist engines to crawl your website. While Sucuri cannot control the pace at which these entities operate, we do have the advantage of our brand, our relationships, and the volume of submissions on a daily basis.
In the process, we take various steps to help harden your website after the cleanup and prevent future attacks. Our team will provide instructions to new clients so they can avoid reinfection. If the website is somehow reinfected, rest assured that we offer unlimited cleanup requests throughout the lifetime of the subscription. Additionally, the Website Security Platform provides several monitoring options, alerting you instantly if we detect anything that could compromise the security of your website.
At Sucuri, we believe that investing time, effort, and resources into research and remediation is the only way to build a strong website security company. No fluff, no fuss – just 100% security geeks, eager to help you clean your website and make the web safer. When it comes to SEO poisoning, Sucuri has the antidote. Our systems and approach are built from years of experience and revolve around three key elements – People. Process. Technology.
