In my blog post this week I wanted to talk about websites that have been compromised for the purpose of increasing rankings in the search engines. (Google)
The one that annoys me the most is the Payday Loans. For the last month I have been tracking the search results on Google UK page 1. And what I have seen is not only annoying but very concerning.
There`s a bunch of talented black hat SEO`s out there using their skills to hack into well-established websites and rewrite the htaccess file`s and/or drop in anchor links to point to another website. I have been seeing that practice quite a lot recently especially in the Payday loans industry.
So let`s get straight into it, as of today 22nd August 2012 is you Google “payday loans” the top spot on page 1 is a website called federationcja.org
federationcja.org for the record is an Jewish Community website and has completely nothing todo with the Payday Loans Industry.
The website has been near or at the top of Google page 1 for “payday loans” now for about a week.
That`s top spot, I wonder how much extra traffic that website is receiving! There`s another hacked website as well on first page of Google. “The Old Ceremony” Yet again a website that has completely nothing todo with the payday loans industry.
The only problem is whomever attacked those websites did not finish the job, if you click on the link`s it still takes you to the original website it does not redirect you elsewhere to the intended website of the attacker. Or maybe that`s security settings on my firewall protecting me. It`s easy to understand why they attack websites, the top listing for “payday loans” on Google UK is reportedly worth £100.000 a month.
With constant Google Algorithm updates making harder and taking longer to rank well there will more well-established websites being attacked, It`s really clever how the attackers have carried out the attack but I’m not going into detail on how they did, lets just 1000`s of websites with low security where also attacked just to push up the federationcja.org website for the phrase “payday loans” just take a look at the images below I captured from www.ahrefs.com
So unless you want to be their next victim make sure your website is secure. Do regular website security audit`s as you sometimes can not visibly notice if your website has been hacked into.