What is negative search engine optimization (SEO)?
Business owners care about marketing their business, so they take steps to make it visible in target markets online. But this may be the least of your worries, as unscrupulous competitors pop up out of nowhere and attack your SEO rankings or ban you from Google search engines for violations.
Negative SEO has been a topic in almost every online marketing forum where they inquire whether competitors are capable of attacking your website with such ferocity. Recent experiences have shown that negative strategies can negatively affect both SEO ranking and Google’s acceptability rating, contrary to what has been said above.
Google alone devised security measures to ensure that website owners did not tamper with search engine rankings. The penalty is harsh: get banned from Google’s search index immediately. Negative SEO practices include using numerous backlinks pointing to the target site to fool Google’s algorithm and manipulate SEO rankings.
When Google’s crawlers find your site with a profusion of questionable backlinks, they do the obvious: they penalize you by removing it from Google’s ranking. Most of the sites that are high authority – the local Chamber of Commerce, local educational sites, business organizations, charities, TV and news shows may have nothing to worry about. These sites are highly authoritative that no amount of negative attacks can get Google to ban them.
However, it is often the smallest businesses and website owners who are most vulnerable to such an attack. There are several classic ways of how they are done:
1. When you talk about negative SEO, you most likely think of: spammers and competitors whose desire is to lower your ranking or get you out of Google search engines. They can do this by using malware, hacking, or injections. Lurking hackers can find vulnerabilities in your security FTP logins so they can easily attack you.
Hackers can enter and inject spam or spam links to alter your site. Another example would be spammers who edit their text file to avoid Google crawlers or restrict Internet Protocol (IP) within a certain range. What happens next is that you will be pulled out of search engines and most likely infecting visitors with malware and viruses, unless security holes are connected.
2. The biggest and nastiest technique used by attackers today is generating disreputable links to your website. This topic has been discussed in various forums as it was noticed that various sites sprouted up offering negative SEO services nowadays. These sites had managed to remove a large number of rankings from various small businesses. Getting hit by this kind of strategy might not get you out of Google right away, but it can surely take your ranking status down a couple of stairs.
What can you do?
1. It might be a good idea to check the sites that are linked to your website. You can leave them or remove them if you don’t feel good about the quality of the sites.
2. For starters, you should have strong brand signals: good branding, good links, well-written press, high metrics, and lots of people searching on your website; This will protect you from negative SEO campaigns.
3. Your website must have a solid foundation and the necessary metric tool to monitor foul play. Playing the field above the table and being honest in your dealings with Google can also go a long way. Google created the Penguin algorithm update and the Google Webmasters Tool to identify patterns that tend to manipulate links. Obviously, it is difficult for them to determine if the site has serious problems of its own or if a competitor is employing negative SEO.
4. Therefore, as a website owner, being aware of these controversies should help you increase your awareness of the issues negative SEO faces. These would also help maintain your long-standing presence in the market and also maintain your well-deserved Google ranking.
What is a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack?
DDoS is an attack on a network resource by making it unavailable to its intended users. The reason would generally be to interrupt a provider’s hosting services, either temporarily or indefinitely, to damage the business. These are usually performed by disgruntled competitors and as a tool for a resistance movement. It is sometimes referred to as “Internet street protest,” as Richard Stallman, a computer programmer and well-known activist in the free software freedom movement, puts it.
There are many DDoS attacks that are capable of bringing networks to their knees. Among the most common are:
1. Flooding the site with useless traffic or communication that would make the site unable to respond to legitimate inquiries. This is also known as the SYN flood attack. An attacker can flood the server with TCP / CYN without recognizing the server’s CYN response. The result is that the session table fills up with session queries, rendering it unable to accept legitimate queries for the connection until the idle timer is turned off.
2. ICMP flood attack: It is similar to CYN flood attack. The only difference is that the attacker downloads a large number of ICMP echo requests with a spoofed IP address. This has caused many sleepless nights for network administrators in the past, who were among the first to have been “killed” by using various methods.
3. UDP Flood Attack: It is like the ICMP attack, except that the IP packets containing the UDP datagram are used against its victims.
4. Ground attack: the attacker uses the IP address of the victim as source and destination. If the victim is unaware of the attack, they may end up trying to connect with it and hit a dead end until they have reached the idle timeout value.
5. Tear attack: This type of attack fragments and reassembles IP packets where an attacker can transmit fragmented IP packets. These packages contain overlapping shard offsets to deplete the victim’s resources when reassembling.
6. Ping of Death: A variation of ICMP that causes a system to crash. The attacker sends an IP packet containing more than the 65,507 bytes of data allowed causing the system to hang.
What to do?
Regardless of the type of DDoS attack, current techniques fail to mitigate the damage it can cause at any given time. Some of the techniques used are not optimized to cope with the increasing sophistication of today’s attacks. Firewalls are rudimentary ways to prevent these events, but they are not specifically designed to protect the internal system against today’s most advanced types. Other strategies, such as overprovisioning, do not guarantee full protection against larger vicious attacks and are too costly as a DDoS prevention strategy.
Businesses with an online presence can invest in DDoS protection. This type of protection may come at its own cost to implement. However, the DDoS solution can have compelling reasons in terms of future revenue streams if solutions are implemented for total protection. It is imperative that large companies, government units and service providers, among others, protect the integrity of their business operations as a matter of corporate policy and as a means of market survival.
