Websites compromised by SEO spam typically suffer from contamination with spam content and keywords, leading to degraded search results and unwanted traffic redirection to third-party spam sites.
SEO spam damages a website’s credibility and search engine rankings by injecting or altering content to promote unsolicited products or services. This not only degrades the user experience but can also lead to severe penalties from search engines, including the potential delisting of the website.
These attacks exploit a website’s search rankings to benefit from affiliate marketing and other unethical SEO tactics. Common infection methods include .htaccess redirects, PHP, or database injections. The impact of SEO spam is severe, potentially diminishing website rankings and organic traffic, reducing revenue, and risking browser warnings and blocklisting by search engines for hosting malicious or phishing content.
SEO Spam Categories
- Doorways: Known also as gateway pages or jump pages, these are filled with long-tail keywords to manipulate search rankings and redirect users to different destinations.
- Injector: This category includes spam that surreptitiously adds unwanted links into a website’s content, typically only visible to search engines.
- Redirect: Consists of injections that exploit a website’s page authority, redirecting visitors to spammy third-party domains.
- Other: A broad category that includes injected SEO spam for various products and services such as pharmaceuticals, payday loans, essay writing, escort services, adult content, and counterfeit merchandise. SEO spam malware may have multiple components. And while some of them can be easily categorized, there may still be multiple other files we tag as miscellaneous and belonging in this group.
