How to Protect Your Website from SEO Attacks: About Spambots and Hacking Technologies

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If you have been a victim of a bot spam attack, you will find this article useful. The tips and tools described here will help you protect your site and restore your rankings and SEO.

SEO attacks by spammer bots are increasing year after year, currently accounting for 25.6% of the world's total internet traffic. To do this, attackers use bots and techniques that allow them to bypass common security measures.

Websites of large and small companies are becoming victims of bot attacks, which wipe out all the efforts of marketers to optimize web resources. The efforts, time and money put in are simply wasted. This leads to a sharp drop in traffic and income.

If you have become a victim of an SEO attack on your site(s), here you will find instructions on how to restore your positions and, if possible, protect yourself from bot spam. You will also learn about smart prevention and modern traffic monitoring systems.

Contents
1. What is SEO
2. What are spambots?
3. 10 Most Common SEO Spam Techniques
3.1 Content spam
3.2. Content parsing
3.3. Reading and intercepting credentials
3.4 SQL injections
3.5. Link spam
3.6. Generation of redirects
3.7. Referral spam
3.8. UGC spam
4. How to recognize a bot attack
5. Step-by-step guide: ways to protect yourself from bots and SEO attacks
5.1. 1. Install a security system on the site
5.2. 2. Scanning
5.3. 3. Find out how you were hacked
5.4. 4. Clean spam from top pages
5.5. 5. Follow the site
5.6. 6. Optional: Restore from Backup
6. Install the Anti-bot protection system "Antibot for the site"

What is SEO​

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a set of works on website promotion in search engines. It includes page-by-page optimization of the resource with the selection of keywords, placement of optimized texts, as well as external promotion to attract target traffic for specified keywords (placement of backlinks, marketing texts in target groups and channels, etc.).

What are spambots​

SEO spam bots are very similar to the helpful crawlers from search engines that scan a site. However, instead of indexing content, these robots look for vulnerabilities and exploit them to penetrate.

Why? They are engaged in spamdexing. In essence, such spam attacks are designed to use someone else's attacked site to promote their own and reduce the donor's positions.

Bots bring huge profits to attackers. Black SEO methods are used to hide the attack.

10 Most Common SEO Spam Techniques​

Below is a list of the ten most common spam techniques used by scammers:

Content spam​

A cybercriminal hacks a website and posts spam content on it. To protect users from malicious content, search engines pessimize and exclude such resources from search results. They do this by injecting URLs (i.e. creating new pages with dangerous "fillings").

Content parsing​

Collection and copying of information (texts, meta tags, images) in automatic mode. Can be used later to create clones and place ads for click fraud or to pessimize the attacked resource with the clone reaching the TOP of search.

Reading and intercepting credentials​

Attackers use special programs to intercept transmitted packets with user credentials that they enter when authorizing on a website.

SQL injections​

SQL injection into text fields is one of the most common types of spam attacks. Attackers choose the most vulnerable entry points where the database request is generated: authentication forms, directories, search strings, REST requests, and URLs.

Link spam​

Link spam is a strategy of promotion by placing an excessive number of external links. It is a type of black SEO, since it is an attack by bots on third-party resources and illegal placement of links to the promoted resource on it.

Used to improve the efficiency of search engine promotion. Attackers disguise the placement of links so that the site owner may not know that he has been attacked by bots, unless he uses special resource analysis services.

Generation of redirects​

Fraudsters use spam redirects both to boost traffic for one site and for several at once, since multiple resources can participate in a redirect chain. This is done by introducing redirects from a "donor".

Referral spam​

Referral spam, also known as log spam or referrer bombing, is a method of generating invalid traffic using spambots to improve SEO and search engine rankings. They substitute the HTTP_REFERER (source) as if a real user were clicking on the link.

UGC spam​

This is spam traffic generated on self-filled UGC platforms by users. People themselves post content on various topics, including for promotion. Attackers also did not fail to use bots to generate links through this channel.

Often, the main goal of spam is to insert hidden links. This technique helps to increase the ranking rating of the hacker's resource and increase its income, while lowering your positions. There are frequent cases of malicious redirects, when attackers redirect SEO traffic from a ranking resource to their sites.

In each of these cases, the spam bot's job is to boost real traffic through fraudulent means.

How to recognize a bot attack​

Spam bots, provided that they have high-quality and advanced "stuffing" in their code, can bypass standard protection tools built into the site. They place links and create pages in the most hidden way possible, disguising them as content.

The CMS you choose may have vulnerabilities you never thought about, so you are likely to become another victim of SEO attacks. You can determine whether you have been attacked by bots or spammed by the following signs:

• traffic drop,
• the appearance of new pages that you did not create yourself,
• warnings from analysis services (Yandex.Webmaster, Google Search Console).
• Malicious site warnings in search results.

Some resource owners use the following tools to detect SEO spam:

• firewalls,
• logging,
• monitoring systems.

You can identify system vulnerabilities in advance. For example, if you use the WordPress CMS, you can find the most popular cases of bot attacks with spam on websites on the Internet.

Ready-made advice and solutions to problems on specialized SEO forums, depending on the detected "hole" in the system, will help to protect the integrity of the resource. For example, special plugins for this management system include MalCare or Wordfence, which increase the security of the site.

Step-by-step guide: ways to protect yourself from bots and SEO attacks​

To protect yourself from bot attacks and malicious black hat SEO scams and improve your site security, you will need to take a few steps.

1. Install a security system on your website​

Install a bot blocking system on your site, such as Antibot by Botfaqtor. The tool helps detect malicious and invalid traffic and block such transitions in time.

In this case, the following methods of protection against spam bots are used:

• check the technical parameters of visitors and, if signs of bots are detected, block their access to the resource,
• conduct behavioral analysis that detects any abnormal traffic,
• use machine learning to detect bots,
• check the fingerprint of site visitors to classify them,
• Advanced analytics enhance security and provide time to remediate malicious actions.

As a result, the site will be protected from bot attacks and spam. Clickers, malicious bots and competitors who want to "sink" your resource and destroy all the efforts made in SEO are blocked once and for all.

2. Scanning​

To identify affected pages, run a site scan using special analyzers. For example, the Xenu program (also Screaming Frog), which will allow you to find malicious external links, new pages, meta tags, etc.

Don't forget to scan the site manually:

• Pay attention to search engine warnings in webmaster consoles.
• Check pages where traffic has dropped sharply, perhaps you will find malicious SEO spam in the visual part of the content.
• Run a scan with Screaming Frog or something similar.
• Connect to your site via FTP and browse through your folders to see if you can find any pages you created manually.
• You can do without FTP: open the site in a browser and go to developer tools to view the code. You may find hidden links there.

If you have access to logs, be sure to analyze them and find out where the traffic is coming from. Find pages that could have been created by bots. It will take a lot of time to check and clean all this.

3. Find out how you were hacked​

If the site is securely protected, you don't have to worry about hacking. As a rule, spam bot attacks are aimed at finding existing vulnerabilities that were not detected and fixed in time. Attackers can penetrate sites in the following ways:

• malicious plugins,
• outdated software,
• SQL injections,
• simple FTP/admin passwords.

The most important step is to make sure that all software and plugins on the site have been updated to the latest versions in a timely manner. Update all outdated scripts. If you notice any that you did not create, delete them.

Cybercriminals are smart and cunning, so even if you cleaned up the site, they can leave a script on your server to restore access to the site in the future. It is advisable to involve another "hand" that will help you review the logs and find out how the attack went.

4. Clean spam from top pages​

This set of works will depend on the type of attack. If users create content on your site themselves, then it will be problematic to determine which of them were created by real people and which by bots. Then you will need to delete spam pages.

In addition, please follow these steps:

• analyze your analytics,
• Mark the pages that were most affected by the attack,
• start with the most affected pages.

It is recommended to start removing spam from the top pages that have good search positions and bring the most traffic. This will allow you to maintain or quickly restore their rating in the eyes of search engines.

You will need to carefully review all affected pages for:

• redirects,
• hidden links,
• Malicious advertising or coding.

You may need to manually review each such page. It is time-consuming, but useful and important.

Even if a bot inserted a malicious link in the end-to-end footer of a site, this does not mean that the content of a separate page was not affected. Once you are sure that all spam has been removed, all that remains is to wait for reindexing.

5. Monitor the site​

Monitoring should become part of your daily activities. There are several ways to do this:

• analyze the rating through panels and other audit services to help SEO specialists for any changes;
• monitor logs for suspicious activity;

You need to determine exactly how the attack occurred and pinpoint the entry point. However, it also happens that the bot leaves a backdoor on the server and returns with another batch of spam.

It is vital to continue to monitor your site for any suspicious activity so that you can quickly remediate the effects of an SEO attack.

6. Optional: Restore from backup​

If you are very lucky and catch the attack early, you can restore your site to its previous state using an instant restore backup. However, if customers have placed new orders or you have a stream of user registrations, this option is out of the question.

Unfortunately, the backups will still contain the original vulnerabilities that led to the successful bot attack. If the attack goes undetected for weeks or months, your backups may already be compromised, making this solution unusable.

Install the Antibot for Site protection system​

Spambots are dangerous because they can remain undetected for a long period of time. If a bot can get into your site using vulnerabilities and insert external links or other malicious content, such as advertising, it can quickly ruin its reputation and ruin all your SEO efforts.

It can be quite difficult to detect an attack of this kind. Spammer bots create thousands of pages on a site using physical files, so they remain undetected on the CMS admin panel side.