I came across a great question in LinkedIn this past week, and took the opportunity to document basically what it is, in a simple version:
Question:
What is an ‘SEO poisoning attack’?
SEO poisoning attacks are primarily attacks on popular websites using XSS or cross server scripting.IFrame viruses also act like this. Iframe are the most dangerous viruses that attack websites online through low server or FTP password leakage. These viruses then target to different websites which contains some exploit matters, images and content.
Answer:
This is a sophisticated attack that is being perpetrated on a daily basis. (We just had one of these this week)
Basically, the hacker includes a script (in apache config, in your wordpress blog, htaccess), etc. That says, if the incoming user agent = googlebot, etc. SEND THEM here. If its not, display that site.
So in my customers example, All of his SEO ranking were showing porn, viagra, etc. But to end users, the site worked just fine. So when Google crawled his site, google was redirected to other content. Google indexes it, and moves on. So now, ALL of your SEO for your site is showing indexed data for the porn site.
Even worse now, the one we dealt with last week, was operating a ‘webring’ of sorts. That is, the sites referred to each other as well. These cracked sites were thus increasing the SEO value of the porn links exponentially as the ring grew (as more infected sites were added). This was growing at approx 30 sites a day.
The main ‘benefit’ here is that the Google indexes this hackers’ site, using your backlinks, etc. to your site to grow his SEO value.
Seems like everyone wants a good ranking from Google :-/
Unfortunately, this is a sophisticated attack, and usually has many layers (in this case, the redirects were in 4 different places, and took us hours to find).
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In this case, our poor customer now has to wait xx period before google recrawls, and updates its records. Anyone in the SEO business knows this is a complete MESS, and will take time to rebalance.
