SEO Spam and How It Affects Your Website

Today, search engines are flooded with infinite websites. It is important for content creators like you to develop a technique that outshines your website. But with the ongoing exponential increase in cybercrime the search engine optimization technique has also found itself in its trap. Hence, it has become extremely important for content creators to avoid SEO spam and write authentic content.

What Is SEO?

SEO is a process of obtaining traffic from free, natural, editorial, and organic search results on the search engines; namely Google, Yahoo, etc.

SEO today has become a practice; which everyone in the tech industry follows, whether it is a start-up company of a well-furnished industry.

What Is An SEO Spam? word image -

Just like any other digital marketing technique, SEO is also not foolproof of all the spams and malware. There are people who deliberately manipulate the Search engine indexes. Which allows them to include the content at a place where it otherwise shouldn’t have.

The motive behind SEO spamming is simple, web searches are a prominent resource for all the valuable referrals. SEO Spammers want a huge part of that data. For which they don’t want to work for it and achieve those resources via legitimately secure ways.

Spamdexing:

SEO poisoning also is known as spamdexing is a method to spam the search engine outcomes with the content that doesn’t belong in a prominent position of that particular website. Thus, this leads to SEO Spams.

Spamdexing can be done by a number of methods such as link building, Black Hat SEOs, etc. The most common technique is keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing is a form where link spamming comment forums and threads are used as doorway pages and thus giving the web pages an undue platform in the search results.

SEO Malware:

SEO Malware is software if enters a server will modify or recreate web pages that will then work according to the interest of the spammer.

The simplest example of it can be the malware adding thousands of new pages to the site. There are hackers who overtake some of the most popular WordPress Sites and use the malware to affect the brand of the websites and cause errors in the server.

We might assume that SEO spam would be easy to locate, but it is not true. Spammers go beyond and hide their work in such a way that the malware code is often not visible to any of the ordinary visitors. There are malware codes that are only shown to search engine crawlers.

Types of SEO Spam

With so many techniques to manipulate the data present online, it has become very difficult to identify the type of spam harmful for your device or website.

Here are some types of SEO Spam, to help you identify the spam so that you can protect your website before it is too late.

1. Comment Spam:

Comment spam is one of the most annoying yet common SEO spam. The spammers use software such as ScrapeBox; this software helps them find the potential target and blasts them with comments.

At first, these comments might seem harmless to the victims, but they are the source of backlinks to the spammer’s website.

One might think that deleting these comments can be helpful, but that is rarely true, since spammers while comment spamming usually blast your site with over 12 thousand comments. So, it is not possible to delete or sometimes even identify these comments.

The most common mistake a website owner can do is not using CAPTCHA Since manually detecting is impossible; one can use WordPress plugins to remove all of these comments at once. So, its always advised using plugins and Captcha to remove all the potential comment spams.

2. Trackback Spam:

trackback Spam

Much like comment spam, This SEO spam; Trackbacks can be one of the quickest ways to spam your website.

Most of us can argue that Trackbacks were created to help generate more traffic and make long term connections with the viewers. The purpose of this is to notify the webmaster wherever there is a new backlink, which is done by generating a link back to the source of the backlink.

For example, if someone links to you, your website or content will generate a link back to them. Which helps you notice and quickly establish a connection. Which is indeed a good way to promote your content.

But the problem begins when we leave the trackbacks unmonitored. The spammers create links to the targeted website and then respond via a trackback which when set live, have the potential to remove you; the owner. And then further contacting the viewers through your website.

3. Negative SEO Attack:

It is a type of Spam that harms your business to a large extent. The main motive of this attack is to make the search engines like Google to think that your website is the one performing BlackHat SEO measures.

The potential spammers are usually the nasty competition of your brand trying every possible way to pull you down.

Negative SEO Attack has many forms and if not be taken care of it can lead to hacking of your website as well.

4. Bots, Spiders, and DDoS Attacks:

Bots, Spiders, and DDoS Attacks: that affects website security

DDoS Attack Explained

Distributed Denial of Service Attack is a large amount of fake traffic seen on your website for a short period of time. Bots and Spiders can attack your account for various reasons, they can either enter your account as a search engine crawler or it enters when you access some unauthorized site.

These attacks are not very harmful, usually, spammers use this to access your server’s bandwidth or firewall.

5. Email Spam:

Once a spammer gets a hang of your email, he will blast your email with unwanted emails. These emails are potential viruses or bugs to access your personal computer and the data within.

But to make sure you have safe email transactions, Google accounts to make sure all the potential spam emails go to a different column and that helps you identify and further delete these spam emails.

Due to all of these types of SEO Spam, people today can lose their business. In the online world, one has to be extra cautious to gain the trust of viewers and these types of spams can really affect those.

SEO Spam Detection

Easy steps to detect any type of potential SEO Spams.

Searching

site:[your site root URL]

displays spam results

After this, you might find some unwanted word junctions along with your domain name and that is how you can find out that malware is affecting your site and using your website to divert Google searches towards them.

word image 24 -

Japanese Keyword Hack

The spam is the Japanese Keyword Hack, which allows the hacker to manipulate crucial settings like Sitemaps and creates new pages with Japanese text on them which further redirects your web page to phishing/ads pages or it will return a 404 error. You can use SEO Spam detector to check if your website is affected by the spam or not.

Remove SEO Spam Today

Once the Spam is detected, you can either delete it manually or heir someone to do that for you. Now it becomes really difficult to find the spam sometimes. So one of the most convenient options is to reach for outside help.

WordPress Spam Malware infections can be prevented with following best WP security practices & using a security solution. It automatically secures and patch the software defects and further prevents your website from all the malicious requests from outside.

Thank You!

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Pronay Sarkar

Hello!
I am Pronay Sarkar, I love to write about tech and stuff. I am a college graduate from the University of Delhi.

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