Reverse SEO: Kill The Competition And Fill The Void

As competition in search continues to grow and grow, so to do the efforts of crooks and miscreants to hijack, damage or destroy the legitimately gained rankings of their competitors. We’ve seen many instances of malicious link insertion and now there are increasing examples of other attacks being used to tar the reputation of targeted websites.

If you can create a scenario in which your competitors sites are seen by the search engines as hosting a bunch of spam/malicious links, your site can perform well in the void that is created. The techniques simply insert spam links into the target site. Once Google crawls that site and sees the spam it will see it is untrustworthy- once marked as spam the site may disappear altogether from the rankings.

This type of activity has been labeled "evil SEO", but that’s way too simplistic a view. It is an attack, in the same way that a defacement is an attack. What is interesting is that the value of search has reached such a peak that any method for gaining search visibility is worth a shot for some people.

So how would someone do this?..

…if a site allows the execution of mark-up or code inserted from a publicly accessible mechanism- such as through a browser- it is vulnerable. For example, if your site runs SQL it is possible that that someone can manipulate the site to insert content, in this case spammy links, or links to flagged malicious websites. This is most often achieved through the browser. If there is no filtering for certain characters, or if it allows the insertion of a string of characters where only numbers should go, then your site is vulnerable.

Similarly, with non-SQL web applications and sites it may be possible to insert mark-up or code into a form input field, or browser that will create on-page changes to a site

Related Posts

1. Reverse SEO: Kill The Competition And Fill The Void- update
2. Hackers Don’t Deface Sites Any Longer
3. Dynamic Keyword Insertion-PPC Management
4. Spammers Attack Google Adwords
5. Bad Linking and the Worlds Worst SERP Snippet
6. Linking Out to Spam Sites Hurts Your Rankings
7. Tracking “other” Marketing with Google Analytics
8. SEO for Mobile Websites- Part 2

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 9:57 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.