SEO 1 - Hackers 0
In today’s world of digital technology, hacking is a major problem. Whether it is a 16 year old spotty kid, an employee with a grudge or malicious fraudsters, they are all bad news. Primarily they are after one of three things; data, (IE. credit card details), simple destruction and finally link equity. The latter is what this blog is about, simple destruction is normally apparent straight away, as your site will be going down and data theft should be extremely difficulty to do, because it normally means hacking into your server, which is your server providers’ responsibility and they normally have a 24/7 security team protecting it. This is the case in most circumstances, as long as your site has protection against SQL injection. The loss of link equity is a lot harder to spot. What normally happens is a hacker will create page, or imbed a link to its current page within your site to promote their malicious site. Now although you might not be aware of the problem, over time this can harm your site exponentially, and the first thing you will know of it is when this page comes up in the SERP’s when you click through to your site from Google:
If it gets to this stage I suggest that you get professional help or read my next blog, ‘I’ve been hacked, what to do next’. If you have an SEO contract, it will supposedly never get this far, as all good SEOs should be investigating your links on a regular basis, and a malicious link will stand out link a sore thumb. For instance, we had a client come on board with us last month, while looking though the link data, we came across a dozen links to an adult content site. I can’t repeat what the anchor said, but it wasn’t good. The hacker had embedded the links into a page that they had created in one of their CSS folders. This was immediately apparent of being hacked and we dealt with it swiftly. Had we of been general web developers, we probably would never have spotted the problem, let alone find it and delete the pages in question. After a password change and the deletion of the said pages, the site now runs fine, so chalk one up for the SEO’s!
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