SEO is one of the most powerful strategies in the digital world. It determines your online visibility and, therefore, your access to new and returning digital customers. It's no surprise that every brand under the sun is competing for SEO positions and, now, so are the hackers with a strategy called SEO poisoning.

SEO poisoning is a new batch of hacker strategies designed to use SEO tactics to dominate search terms and redirect users to malicious sites. SEO poisoning attacks can damage your website and brand in several ways. As cybersecurity experts, Quttera can help you prepare and defend against this new threat on the horizon.

SEO poisoning is the process of stealing SEO-related traffic, taking users to harmful sites, or through infected links. There are several types of SEO poisoning. Some are passive-aggressive manipulation of the SEO system to promote hacker websites. Others are direct attacks on legitimate websites.

Types of SEO Poisoning

• Keyword Hijacking: Using popular keywords to promote malicious websites. This includes "typo-jacking" or "typosquatting", where attackers use misspellings of your brand or products as keywords.
• Content Theft: Stealing and copying popular content to steal SEO traffic and page ranking from legitimate websites.
• Brand Impersonation: Creating a copy of your website and posing it as a legitimate site to steal traffic and direct users to malicious links.
• Website Infiltration Redirects: Infiltrating your website to redirect your customers or seed your website with malicious backlinks.

While keyword hijacking is irritating, content theft, brand impersonation, and website infiltration are all direct attacks on your website that serve the purposes of SEO poisoning. These attacks can not only steal traffic and put your customers at risk, but they can also damage your brand reputation if you do not take swift action.

SEO poisoning attacks can depend on whether the attack is theft or infiltration.

Identifying content theft can be done by selecting a unique passage from your content pages and linking it to a Google Alert. You can also use regular plagiarism scans on your website. Both services will help you identify if your website's unique content has appeared in other places on the internet. Stolen content steals the traffic you earned by writing good content in the first place. Hackers also like to stuff stolen content with extra keywords to steal even more traffic.

Identifying website impersonation, on the other hand, can be done by regularly searching for your site and primary keywords. You can check to be sure that only your website and legitimate competitors appear. If a duplicate entry of your website or a suspicious copy appears, investigate. However, make sure to use a proxy, as the duplicate is likely infected.

Identifying infiltration SEO poisoning is more complex. You must use a content scanner to detect recent changes including alterations to your code, ad services, page content, and embedded links. You should also monitor your website for suspicious activity to catch infiltrators in the act.

When it comes to infiltration SEO poisoning, you can take several secure prevention measures to keep hackers from altering your content with poison links.

Regular Backups
It is always important to take regular backups of your website so you can restore it after any mishap or create a clean copy at any time. If you identify signs of SEO poison infiltration, you can quickly restore a safe version of your website from a recent backup to protect your customers from dangerous routes and hazards.

Secure Your CMS and Plugins
Always keep your website CMS, theme, and plugins up-to-date with the latest security patches. Ensure they are configured with the most secure settings and minimize admin account access to reduce the risk of someone hacking an admin account.

WAF Protection
You can also protect your website using a WAF or web application firewall. This is a special type of firewall designed to monitor web traffic in and out of a website. A WAF can protect your website from malicious traffic, code injection, and malware infiltration and even prevent routing to known malicious domains.

How do you prevent SEO poisoning tactics from copying your website's content and brand? This strategy is more complex because you cannot directly control sites hosted by content-stealing hackers. Fortunately, there are measures you can take to report malicious copies and have stolen content taken down.

First, seed your content with unique words and phrases that are easy to search for, scan, and identify as yours. Consider these "secret keywords" that are less likely to appear in competitor content. Then, scan regularly for excerpts from your pages and blogs to detect plagiarised copies.

When/if you identify stolen content, you can report it to the web host (using ICANN) requesting a DMCA takedown. You can also report it to Google and request the de-listing of the copied content from search results.

The more original and high-quality your brand content, the more desirable it is to steal — and the easier it is to defend. If your content is unique from other results for the same search terms, you can more easily prove your authorship and defend your right to have copies taken down.

Lastly, you can build a buffer against SEO poisoning and website impersonation by building a strong online reputation. When your audience immediately recognizes and trusts your brand, they will be more resistant to attempts to poison your brand or keywords and theft of your content. The stronger your online brand, the easier it will become to protect your customers from shoddy, low-effort (ex: content-scraped) impersonations.

Here are a few tips to quickly strengthen your online reputation:

• Provide high-quality and highly interactive web pages. More detailed websites are also harder to impersonate and are more enjoyable for visitors.
• Respond to all positive reviews with thanks and personal comments.
• Respond to negative reviews with offers to problem-solve or debunk false reviewers with data proof. A skillful and courteous response to negative reviews can also provide a big reputation boost.
• Attend to customer requests quickly and effectively.
• Ask customers to share featured testimonials and personal stories.
• Continuously add high-quality content to your website.

SEO poisoning is a new type of threat that puts your hard-earned SEO rank and your brand reputation at risk. From content theft to malware that spreads malicious links through your website, the best way to defend yourself is with attentive monitoring. Monitor your content for copies and plagiarism while monitoring your website for malware and harmful content changes. It is also important to monitor your website's ranking and traffic to detect keyword manipulation.

From there, build a plan that will help you swiftly respond to each type of SEO poisoning attack to keep your website, brand reputation, and valued customers safe from harm. Your SEO poisoning response plan should also include:

• Identifying and removing poisoned backlinks inserted after publishing the content
• Reporting duplicates of your content or website identity
• Cleansing your website of any malware intended to poison your SEO or turn your website into a poisoned well

Quttera offers advanced ThreatSign! website defense services that include advanced malware scanning and expert cybersecurity professional assistance to Identify and respond to SEO poisoning attacks. We are here to help keep your website secure, protected, and a safe place for your customers to explore. Contact us for the best protection plan for your business and website.