Defending Against Black Hat and Negative SEO Tactics - Truly Brazen Attacks
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Sometimes you have to be thankful that something didn’t happen that could have happened. Subzero27, another regular poster to SEO Chat’s forums, noted that one day he started getting phone calls and email from the UK complaining that his India-based site was passing on viruses and spyware. He began checking his site from the source code out and couldn’t find anything wrong. He explained that “after deep analysis it was found out that someone had poisoned the dns and whichever sites were hosted on that particular server were being redirected.”
He notes that he was very lucky that Google didn’t crawl his site while the DNS poisoning was going on or he would have been in real trouble due to no fault of his own. The attack probably came from a malicious hacker who was trying to get his malware onto other computers rather than harm subzero27’s position in the SERPs. It’s worth keeping in mind, however, that certain kinds of nasty attacks can also hurt your position in the SERPs as a side effect.
One of the most brazen attacks I’ve heard of involved social engineering. Lenny de Rooy, an SEO specialist at Tribal IM, reported this attack back in March of 2007. Someone had sent an email to a number of webmasters that linked to BabyNamesWorld, one of Tribal’s clients. The email was spoofed to look as if it had come from BabyNamesWorld, and was signed BabyNamesWorld Administration. It demanded that the webmaster remove their link to BabyNamesWorld immediately, “because I’m getting a lot of spam traffic and a lot of scammers visiting my site using a link from your site!” The email went on to threaten that if the link was not removed, “I will write an ABUSE MESSAGE to your Internet Service Provider and your hosting company and will complain that your site gives a harmful traffic to my site!”
Rooy summed up the attack as finding out who is linked to a well-ranking rival site, sending them threatening email and waiting for the response. This particular scammer also sent a follow-up email if the link was not removed quickly enough. So what did Rooy do? First, he tracked down the scammer but chose not to force their host to close their account – it was located in Tajkistan, no WHOIS information was provided, and “the scammer can just as easily create another address and continue his work, against whichever website he chooses.”
So Rooy’s company simply saw to it that emails were sent to all the webmasters, telling them not to take the email from the scammer seriously. He observed that “a large number of links have fortunately been replaced. Despite this, it remains an annoying problem.”
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