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9 Types of Online Reputation Attacks and How to defend against them

ByDave Stopher

Jul 31, 2020 #technology

Web positioning is, for many companies, a great source of income. Sometimes, malicious users or the competition itself can carry out Online Attacks that negatively affect the positioning  and online reputation of your brand. Would you know how to defend your website if they attack you?

Types of Online Attacks and how to defend them

Classic SEO attacks

These types of online attacks are the most common and therefore known. Of these attacks, we have highlighted two:

1. Negative Anchor Text Links

This type of Black Hat SEO strategy consists of creating links to a certain website with a negative anchor text . In this way, Google perceives that site as something harmful to the user and reduces its visibility, causing it to lose positions in the SERPs.

SOLUTION

The solution to this problem is simple and well known: Disavow

You can use a tool like  Ahrefs , to found all those pages that linked it with the negative anchor text. You downloaded the CSV file and were left with only those links that you wanted to remove.

The next step was to transfer the file to a valid .txt format and go to the Google Search Console to upload the file with all the negative links that I wanted to disavow before Google.

2. Junk Links

The other classic example of Black Hat is creation of junk links to a website.

This case is worse than the previous one, since it is necessary to go link by link to select the low quality ones and to disallow them.

In this case, it is not intended that Google believe that your site is harmful or associate your website with something negative, but rather that Google believes that you have wanted to improve the positioning of your website by linking your site to multiple pages of poor quality.

SOLUTION

The solution to this problem is the same as the previous one: Disavow

The solution is the same, although this time the process is more difficult, since you cannot filter by the anchor text, but you have to check the links one by one.

Currently, due to Penguin’s granularization, these types of attacks with negative anchors and junk links are not as effective. They still have an effect, but not the one they had a few years ago.

Ddos attacks and code injections

Let’s look at other types of online attacks that are usually related to Black Hat SEO, but that really are not.

They are not SEO, nor Black Hat. Ddos attacks and code injections are illegal.

3. Ddos Attacks

Denial of Service Attack (Ddos) is an attack on a computer system or network that results in users being unable to access a web page. Generally this occurs because this attack has consumed all the bandwidth that this website has or because it has overloaded the system of the attacked page.

SOLUTION

When Ddos attacks have a specific origin , they can be solved with few resources and knowledge, since they are not very complicated . It is only necessary to block the IP from which the requests are being made, for this a firewall can be used, for example.

On the other hand, if the Ddos Attack is variable and comes from different IPs, the solution is complicated, being in some cases almost impossible to solve.

In any case, the first thing to do is try to prevent this type of comments as much as possible, being aware of the vulnerabilities that the website has.

4. Code injections

It is a hacking technique in which malicious code is injected into a website that is invisible to users and even to the web administrator himself, but visible to the Google bot . In this way, hackers can modify any element such as the HTTP protocol , AJAX requests or hidden fields in the forms.

It is likely that if there are 500 people here, 1 or 2 have the page hacked and do not know it

SOLUTION

To know if your website has injected code, you just have to install an extension that allows you to change the view of the User Agent to Google Bot .

5. Real example: José Gallardo

José Gallardo was an unknown man until the moment when he entered a Twitter contest that Aquarius carried out. The prize was to get a wax replica that would remain in the wax museum for a whole year. To win the contest, you had to get the tweet with the highest number of retweets.

José Gallardo did not participate alone, he had great competition with a YouTuber and «Litri» the well-known forum car manager who was supported by forum users. But José realized that if he used Twitter tools that sent an abnormal number of retweets  to rivals, they were penalized.

With this strategy, José was proclaimed winner of the award and his figure remained for a year in the wax museum.

The users forocoches not going to stop there and rode his famous CSI , that is, find out all the information about José Gallardo. As a result of this search, not only was the address where José lived, but they found out what school he went to when he was little and much more.

As revenge for the users of Forocoches, José was receiving pizzas at his home for a whole month.

Informative Manipulation

6. Real Example: Fake News About Justin Bieber

In one of Justin Bieber’s last visits to Spain, the singer starred in a controversial radio visit.

The experiment was to create a false story. Specifically, he modified a tweet from Justin Bieber (inspecting the tweet and changing the content). Based on this false tweet, he created false information that was published in large media such as español.com, el mundo.com and informacion.com.

Creating this type of news is not very difficult, since there are platforms such as Publisuites in which you can publish a news item in a medium, for a fee, and then publish it in other places such as Forocoches, Meneame or Twitter , so that you can give visibility to the false news you have created.

Online Reputation Attacks

7. Online Reputation Attack: Google Suggest

When you put a word in the Google search engine, it automatically offers you a series of results that are the most searched for in relation to that word. These results are offered by a Google algorithm , which can be used for negative or positive purposes:

Negative use

For example, if you use bots and promote searches for « PC Components scam » or « PC Components fishing «, you can damage the reputation of the company and make many users think if buying on the web is safe.

Currently its effect has been diluted and negative results reappear because they are the searches that most users perform naturally.

  1. Online Reputation Attack: Mario Castejo

Mario Castejo is a Spanish user who participated in the lawsuit against Google that sought the elimination of those results that were false and that threatened a person’s reputation, as was his case.

This complaint is responsible for the text of right to be forgotten with the privacy law

In this way, Google is obliged to eliminate any false information about any user. For this reason, we can currently find the following text at the bottom of the results page:

9. Online Reputation Attack: José María Hill Prados

José María Hill Prados is a former convict who carried out a very aggressive online reputation campaign .

The first thing they do in these online reputation campaigns is to use the right to be forgotten to eliminate all possible results. Then, they are dedicated to creating content  that seeks to modify the results and gradually remove negative results from at least the first page of Google.

These types of techniques are widely used by politicians and businessmen.

To conclude with this topic of online reputation, What is the problem of online reputation? What can be done to improve reputation, but also to worsen the reputation of any user or company.

 conclusion

To finish, so how to avoid these kinds of situations . For this, he gave the Yao restaurant as an example , to which he once asked for food, but did not receive it.

Author Bio – Aabhas Vijay is a passionate digital marketer & blogger, You can reach him on his blog www.SMTPServers.co where he teaches about email marketing and how to use free smtp for sending free emails

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