SEO Spam: How Can Your Digital Strategy Agency in India Detect It?

SEO is an excellent way to improve your website ranking while gaining more leads. But some perpetrators try to take advantage of your digital success. The process of hackers hijacking your SEO results is called SEO spam. It can significantly hurt your website ranking. But your digital strategy agency in India can help you.

If you own an online business, you should know what SEO spam is and how it affects your site. You are fortunate. In this post, we will explain everything about SEO spam. Most importantly, we will focus on the hacks best online experts in India use to detect SEO spam.

What is SEO spam?

SEO spam is one of the most common methods by hackers to invade websites. As per this report, nearly 73% of GoDaddy websites were affected by SEO spam.

SEO spamming is also known as spamdexing. It occurs when online scammers embed their links on websites and blogs. However, their primary targets are top-ranking websites on search engines. They can infiltrate these web pages using links. In most cases, the site owners will not even know it. As a result, these links remain on your website and redirect unsuspecting online users to third-party websites.

According to leading search engine marketing services providers, hackers take advantage of security flaws in a website. So, if your site has any of these faults, spammers will leverage your traffic and visitors. These include:

• • Insufficient security on your website.
  • Obsolete plugin, library, or any other component. 

The good thing is your marketing experts can help you remove SEO spam efficiently. But the problem is to know whether your website is infected or not in the first place. As mentioned, many site owners will never come to know that hackers have embedded links in their web pages. For this reason, we have listed tactics by online experts in India to detect SEO spam.

• How do online experts in India find SEO spam in websites?

Digital marketers look for the following symptoms to determine whether hackers have hijacked your website or not.

1. Suspicious new files

One of the ways to find SEO spam on your website is that you will see several new suspicious files. Usually, spammers create a directory in wp-content/plugins/API-key using the following files.

• • Header.php
  • Apikey.php
  • Newsletter.php
  • Login.php
  • Wp-layouts.php
  • Wp-nav-menus.php 

Remember, these files have critical malware code that can seriously affect your website. Other files that malicious code creates in your website root directory are:

• • Wp-main-php
  • Wp-domain.php
  • Wp-uti.php
  • Wp.php 

It means your potential digital strategy agency in India will look for files these files to confirm if your website is infected.

2. Performing a simple Google search

Most online experts in India rely on simple Google searches to detect SEO spam. Firstly, they will type the site using the domain name. After this, they will walk through the search results to find if they notice illogical word junctions attached to the domain name. However, if they see anything like that, it means the site is infected.

This is the type of malware hackers use to make your websites hard to discover by Google searches. And divert it to malicious sites.

3. Google AdWords getting disabled

Another easy hack is Google AdWords getting disabled. Since millions of ads run on the internet, it gives an opportunity to hackers to divert online users to malicious websites. Hence, advertisement networks like Google AdWords have upgraded their security policies to ensure better security and prevent online malware.

In addition to this, Google AdWords checks and scans websites frequently. In this way, they can identify hijacked content and temporarily stop ads from running for the same. Online experts in India emphasize looking for the following warning signs by Google. If you get any of these alerts, your website may be under a malware attack.

• • Malicious software – It may gain authorized access to your device or network. Malicious software could be anything from ransomware to computer viruses, rootkits, trojan horses, dialers, spyware, etc.
  • Landing a page with an unsafe domain – For example, you scan your website, and it detects a particular landing page is hacked by an unauthorized domain. 

4. Scanning files

Your potential search engine optimization services provider may scan files to detect spam links. They may check files like footers, theme headers, or theme functions. In some cases, the professionals may get confused in identifying unknown spam links. And it becomes difficult for them to tell if any malicious links are embedded or not. Therefore, they use an SEO Spam Scanner to scam the websites.

5. Scanning the database

After files, the database is the next potential place for inserting spam links. So, experienced digital strategy agencies in India will never neglect to conduct database scanning. Many hackers embed spammy links into posts and web pages. They think that no one will review the pages manually. After all, it is a daunting task. But marketers are a step ahead of them. That is why they do this instead:

• • They use PHPMyAdmin to access the database. It lets online marketers review multiple pages.
  • With this, you can review posts and pages easily.
  • Upon noticing malicious links, they download the posts and pages and remove the links.
  • Once done, they use a SQL management tool to upload pages and posts. 

Now, you know the hacks online experts in India use to discover websites affected by spam links. But how do they remove SEO spam from web pages? If you are curious to know, read below.

• How to remove spam links from the host website?

A reliable digital strategy agency in India can help you remove SEO spam from your website. Here are the steps professionals follow to fix the affected website.

• • First of all, clear off any malicious files using PHPMyAdmin, as we mentioned already.
  • It is crucial to check the Google Webmasters account because they many disparities.
  • Scanning websites is another great way to detect SEO spam and other malware.
  • Digital marketers also use the Google Webmasters panel to check websites with outbound links to your web pages. 

In closing

Online malware like SEO spam can leave your website in destruction. It means you may face a significant decrease in online traffic and a drop in Google rankings. All this will affect your business reputation, which may lead to low sales and revenue generation. It is crucial to clean up your affected website to ensure better results. Also, when hiring a digital strategy agency in India, look for experience and proficiency in the field.

If you want to know more about SEO spam and other online malware, visit our website. At DigiDuck, we have a team of experts who can help you learn SEO Marketing updates, tips, and hacks.