Are Spammers Abusing Your Website?

A new type of cloaking spam is becoming more popular: Spammers hack popular sites that have a high rating on Yahoo and then insert links keyword rich and redirects to their sites. What can you do to ensure that your website is not abused by spammers?

What is cloaking?

Cloaking is a technique of spam, where content is presented of a search engine spider is different from regular content presented to users.

This is done by delivering content based on user-agent HTTP header of the user requests the page, the IP address of a user or the reference page:

Once the user has been identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script provides a different version of the web page.

The search engine spider can be identified based on the IP address and user-agent HTTP header.

When a user comes to a specific page (eg, Yahoo search results page), a web server offers a different version of the page that users receive when they enter the URL of the page in the browser.

These methods can be combined. A webpage can be blurred based on the IP address, user agent, referring web page, or a combination of these three factors.

How do spammers abuse your website?

Many sites have security holes. Spammers use them to log onto the server and change the content of their websites. They can do the following with your webpages:

• They insert keyword rich links to spammer sites on your web pages. These links are visible to Yahoo indexing spider. For Yahoo, it seems that if your site is to approve the site with a link spammer.
• They redirect visitors to their own pages. Yahoo gets the page regularly. People who visit your web pages after clicking on your website listing on Yahoo's search results will be redirected to the spammer website.

How can you find out if spammers abuse your site?

There are several ways to find out if spammers change your web pages:

• Download the free IBP demo version and select "Tools > Search engine spider simulator". Enter the URL of one of your web pages and select "Yahoo bot". The spider simulator will show you how Yahoo sees your web pages. This method enables you to check if someone returns different pages based on the user-agent.
• Search Yahoo for "site: yourdomain.com" (replace yourdomain.com with your own domain name). Browse the pages of search results and check the titles and descriptions that uses Yahoo for their websites. Click on the list to ensure that visitors are directed to the right side.
• Click on the link "cached" on Yahoo search results pages to see the contents of your domain that Google has indexed the pages. Find links, JavaScript and other elements that do not belong to you.

Use the tips above to see if hackers have changed the content of your web pages. To ensure that hackers can not abuse your site, please use the latest version of your content management system and install security updates.