With more outreach, more websites and more traffic, internet crimes too are becoming common. Here, we are talking about SPAMBOTS, taking rise to 25.6% of all internet traffic. Even though the Internet world has advanced resources for us, it has also introduced more chances of database corruption, inaccuracy in data, and website hijacking. To know how, why, and what to do now, scroll down right below.
What Is An SEO Spambot Attack?
You want more traffic and more Google bot crawling on your website. But what if you come to know that this Google Bot crawling did more harm than help to the website? This is called a Spambot attack. Instead of indexing the content like Google Bots, Spam bots use susceptibilities to damage the website. Also, handpicking and ranking some particular content that would not be ranked otherwise. These SEO spams feed the hackers with these contents and end up dropping the SEO revenue. What you may experience is:
- Credential sniffing
- Content scraping
- Content spam
- Unnecessary link insertions
- Redirect generation
- Google analytics referral spam
- Spam on user-generated content
- Spread virus
- Traffic flooding
- Domain hijacking
- SEO spams
- Fake sign-ups
The most common spam is link insertion, which eases website hacking and damages engagement rates. In fact, these bots also develop fake URLs to redirect the users to their websites instead of the internal links. Thus, a bot attack can damage the overall authentic operations of the website.
While everything is happening internally on the website, here is what a spam bot does externally to the user.
- These flood inboxes with unnecessary photos, videos, messages, and MMS.
- The comment section is loaded with useless content.
- This will miss out on the genuine content and emails.
All in all, Spamdexing can hamper the website’s performance and user experience.
How to Detetct an SEO Spambot Attack?
Bots damage the ordinary thinking capacity of normal detection methods. Phishing bots target websites with internal links and pages that are out of site for users. Sometimes it is the abrupt performance of the website that will remind you that the website is under attack. These red flags may indicate:
- Direction to some random site pages
- A drop in traffic
- Search warnings by Google
- GSC warnings
For big enterprises with successful website operation, the following spam bots can make a difference.
- Logging system
- Monitoring systems
- Firewalls
These weaknesses can take a deeper turn for platforms such as WordPress, causing core vulnerabilities in the following ways.
- SQL injection because of lack of data sanitization in WP_Meta_Query with 7.4 severity level rate.
- Stored Cross Site Scripting (XSS) via authenticated users with 8.0 severity level.
- Authenticated Object Injection in Multisites with a medium level of severity around 6.6.
- SQL Injection via WP_Query because of improper sanitization at 8.0 severity level.
A Step-By-Step Guide To Stop Spambot Attacks
To prevent the damage caused by bot attacks, here are some of the measures to take.
- Prevent Spambots Before It Creates More Damage
Before working on a spambot, you can first dig into how it entered the website and did its harm. So, implement bot protection before it bumps into your website. For this, one of the popular tools is Cloudfare, trusted for its bot cleanliness.
Cloudfare’s management for bots is assisted with AI and machine learning for fighting the bad bots. For real-time protection, the instrument will use a three-pronged approach.
Cloudflare’s bot management solution employs AI and machine learning to combat malicious bots.
To provide real-time protection, the instrument will employ a three-pronged approach.
- Behavioral analysis for detecting traffic anomalies.
- Machine learning for accurately detecting billions of data points.
- Fingerprinting for classifying the existing or previously detected bots.
Rich analytics and logs will embrace site security and give more cleaning time.
- Frequent Site Scan On Impacted Pages
After the implementation of high degree security on the website, the next stage is with a scan for preventing bot assaults. This is what the scan refers to.
- Begin with an analysis report to check the sites falling rapidly. This report will talk about:
- Real time data
- Location of the current user
- Traffic sources for finding the site
- Content for user engagement
- Events to track customisable interactions
- Run scanning with instruments like Screaming Frog, Integrity (for Mac users) and Xenu Sleuth (for PC users), BuzzSumo or similar ones. These help identify the SEO spams and issues with onsite SEO auditing.
- Manual checking with FTP into sites and a tour to the manually created folders.
Lastly, keep an eagle’s eye with manually checking the logs to carefully examine the origination of the traffic or any pages that may have been generated by the bot.
- Discover The Possibilities Of Site Hacking Sources
Secure sites are least prone to having any spam bots. These generally happen with the existing bots that still haven’t been fixed. The possible causes can be
- Outdated software
- Ineffective plugins
- Admin passwords/ FTP that are too easy to guess
- SQL databases injections
Therefore, the first step is to monitor the updates and update the softwares and plug ins regularly. Have a visit through the old scripts and delete the scripts you do not identify.
Phishing bots mostly leave a script to monitor the future actions of your site.
If you have any existing logs, you must go through it to see where the traffic must be coming from. Also, you can team up to collaborate and go through the logs and identify how the bot must have occurred.
Add an extra layer of protection with tools like Cloudfare that provide an added degree of security.
- A Cleaning Drive For The Top Pages
SEO hygiene is the key to stop spambots. Cleaning up the website is determined on the basis of the spambot that happened. If the website holds user-generated pages spam or goes through mass page creation, then you have to begin with a mass cleaning drive of which pages are needed and which are not.
Next, you must identify the spam generated pages and remove those asap.
To examine the sites not created by spammers but can lead to a bot attack, you must identify the following factors.
- Examine the metrics
- Mark pages that can be impacted
- Start with the top pages clean up
Lately, focus on revenue generating pages to assist the ranking. Apart from this, you should monitor the following factors in your pages.
- Hidden hyperlinks
- Redirects
- Harmful codes or advertisements
You have to mop through your website to dump any possibilities of spam bots. Sometimes, you will find such links even on the footer, so go thoroughly through it and several other pages with the possibilities of such links.
Once you have dealt with the spams, you can now monitor the status of the ranking.
- An Eagle-Eye On The Site
Prioritise monitoring your business website frequently to detect the spam bots. For this, you can use several ways.
- Keep an eye on the ranks and the stats for any possible changes.
- Monitor any strange behavior performed on the site.
- Go through the site logs if giving any suspicious indications
- Explore how a spambot must have occurred and identify the point of entry. In fact, sometimes an SEO spam may take a secret door.
To avoid any such entry and ensure that no bots can harm your efforts, you must keep an eye on your website thoroughly.
- An Option To Restore From Backup
Make your efforts worthy with detecting any phishing bots beforehand. If you can notice the early enough, you might be able to restore the previous condition with a snapshot. (But this will not work for a fresh user).
This restoration will also include the vulnerabilities that led to the bot attack. So, use scanning tools like Cloudfare for restoration to prevent attacks that may lead to primary weaknesses.
If the malicious bot still exist, then there are chances of backup corruption.
Bottom Line
You need to ensure two things to run a successful business website.
- Optimum SEO operation for the website to perform brilliantly online.
- A constant check to stop spambots that may hamper the online performance of the website.
To ensure the two, you need an SEO expert to elevate your business’s online presence and generate more revenue. One such online digital marketing platform is OPositive. See your website performing miraculously with a team of professionals holding your back. Visit https://opositive.io/ and get in touch to know more.
FAQ
How do I stop spam bots on my website?
To stop spambots on your website you need to take several protective measures like
- Use bot protection tools to scan and detect bots beforehand.
- Do a frequent site scan
- Know the possibilities of site hacking sources
- Clean the top pages
- Restore backup after detecting
- Get your SEO from professionals like OPositive, who not only perform SEO but also protect SEO spams.
What is SEO phishing?
SEO phishing, also known as SEO poisoning, is when cybercriminals use search engine optimisation for malicious activities like redirecting the user to spoof websites, thus hampering the performance of the visible website.
How do you detect SEO poisoning?
There are several ways of detecting SEO poisoning like redirection to a spoof website, Google search warning, GSC warning, a drop in traffic, etc.
Can SEO spambot attacks affect my search engine rankings negatively?
Yes, SEO bot attacks can hamper your rankings by bothering the users. Users receive flooded inboxes and mails with spam messages, useless content, and a miss on authentic content that will hinder the search of the website. This will reduce the traffic on the site, leading to drop in ranking and revenue.
