There is a type of spamming that is becoming increasingly popular. These spammers are searching for highly ranking websites and inserting keyword rich links to their own sites either by using hacking methods or simply posting comments in your blog. Below are a few tips to ensure your website is not abused by spammers.
What can spammers do to my website?
Websites are not always completely hacker proof. Hackers are sometimes able to get into the server where your website is being hosted and make small changes to the content of your site which can be invisible to the untrained eye. They can also use spam bots to make posts that seem to be made by an actual person. The following can be done to your website:
- They will insert links to their own sites within the written content of your website using the keywords and phrases that are most important on your site. To ensure these links are not noticed by the site owner they will add styling code so that the keywords they used as links on your site appear to be regular text and not a link to their own site. When Google and the other major search engines crawl your site and see these links it appears to them as though you are advocating their website. This can be very damaging to your site. Not only will the search engines view your website as spam, but it will also affect your search engine rankings for important keywords.
- They can redirect your website to their website. When visitors go to your site from the search engines they will be redirected after a few seconds to their own site. They can also make it difficult to allow your visitors to return to your site once they have been redirected to the spam site by placing code that does not allow them to go back to the previous page.
- They will find websites with blogs and forums that do not have proper anti-spam applications built in. This allows spammers to place links within their comments on blog posts giving them a free link to their site. These links have nothing to do with your site and can be damaging to your search engine rankings if they go unnoticed.
How can I protect my site from spammers?
There are several ways to find out if spammers change your web pages:
- LinkVendor provides a free outbound link checking tool that allows you to see if there are any unknown links on the pages of your site that may be redirecting to a spam site.
- Akismet and Disqus are free tools that help to prevent spam from reaching your blog posts.
- Do a Google search for “site:yourdomain.com”. This will allow you to see if any of the titles and descriptions of your website pages have been changed or if there are new pages you did not create. If you are unsure of a page, click on the link to ensure that visitors are only being directed to your site.
- Ensure that the proper security measures have been implemented on your server and are up to date.