Spamdexing (SEO spam malware)

Introduction: About SEO spam — is my website a target?

You’ve spent time and energy in positioning your website high in search engine rankings through good SEO practices. You realize, however, that someone has hijacked your site by inserting their own spam. You are a victim of SEO spam, otherwise known as spamdexing, web spam, search engine spam and more. 

This malware comes in many forms. It is normally used by malicious hackers to bank on the good ranking of reputable sites to spread their links to as many users as possible.

This threat is carried out through a number of tactics of SEO manipulation, including ways to create websites that trick search engine algorithms to high-rank spam content. It was first introduced in 1996, when the schemes used by spammers mostly revolved around excessively repeating unrelated phrases or increasing the number of links with the goal of attracting traffic. 

Spamdexing evolved to include other techniques, including comment spam (used to build backlinks) that automatically posts irrelevant comments that provide no value to the discussion but are used to improve the webpage ranking. As search engines fine-tuned their algorithms, however, spamdexing has become more difficult to achieve for hackers. Yet is far from being a problem of the past.

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What is spamdexing?

Spamdexing is the term used for a “website optimized, or attractive, to the major search engines for optimal indexing.” This SEO spamming involves getting a site more exposure than it deserves for its keywords and, as a result, more visible placement on search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engine poisoning (SEP) abuses the ranking algorithms and takes visitors to pages they did not intend to visit. In some cases, websites are artfully created exactly for that scope; in many others, however, they exploit legitimate sites.

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