What is Negative Search Engine
Optimization (SEO)
Business owners worry about marketing their
business, so they take steps to make it visible to targeted markets online. But
this may be the least of their worries, since unscrupulous competitors pops out
from nowhere and attacks their SEO rankings or gets them banned from Google
search engines for violations.
Negative SEO has been a topic in almost all
online marketing forums where queries are thrown in to know if competitors are
capable of attacking your website in such ferocity. Recent experiences have shown
that negative strategies can adversely affect both SEO ranking and Google
acceptability rating, contrary to what has been said previously.
Google on its own came up with safety
measures to ensure that search engine rankings would not be manipulated by the
website owners. The penalty is a stiff one - being banned from Google's search
index immediately. Negative SEO practices include the use of numerous backlinks
pointing to the targeted site to mislead Google's algorithm and manipulate SEO
rankings.
When the Google crawlers find your site
with a profusion of questionable backlinks, it does the obvious thing -
penalized you by taking you off Google's rankings. Most sites that are of high
authority - local Chamber of Commerce, local education sites, trade organizations,
charities, television and news programs may have nothing to worry about it.
These sites have much authority that no amount of negative attacks can get them
banned from Google.
However, it is usually the smaller
businesses and website owners who are more vulnerable to such an attack. There
are several classic ways on how these are done:
1. When you talk about negative SEO's, you
would most likely think about: spammers and competitors whose desire is to
bring down your ranking or take you out of the Google search engines. They may
do this by using malware, hacking or injections. Hackers on the prowl may find
vulnerabilities in your security FTP logins for them to easily attack it.
Hackers may come in and inject spams or
spam links to alter your site. Another example would be the spammers editing
your text file to prevent Google crawlers, or restrict Internet Protocol (IP)
within a certain range. What happens next is that you will be taken out of
search engines and would most likely infect visitors of malware and viruses,
unless the security holes are plugged in.
2. The nastiest and biggest technique used
by attackers at present, is driving disreputable links to your website. This
issue has been discussed in a number of forums, since it was noticed that a
number of sites sprouted up offering Negative SEO services at present. These
sites had successfully scraped off a lot of ranking from a number of small
companies. Being hit by this type of strategy may not get you banned from
Google right away, but it can sure pull your ranking status a couple of ladders
down.
What can you do?
1. It might be a good idea to review the
sites that are being linked to your website. You can leave them or remove them
if you don't feel good about the quality of the sites.
2. You must have strong brand signals to
begin with: good brand name, good links, well written press, high metrics and a
lot people searching your website - is going to protect you from negative SEO
campaigns.
3. Your website must have a solid
foundation and with the necessary metrics tool to monitor foul play. Playing
the field above board by being honest in your dealings with Google also can go
a long way. Google came up with the Penguin Algorithm update and Google
Webmasters Tool to identify patterns that tend to manipulate links. It is
obviously hard for them to determine whether the site has serious issues of its
own or a competitor is employing negative SEO.
4. Hence, as a website owner, knowing these
controversies should help you beef up on your awareness of issues confronting
Negative SEO. These would also help maintain your long standing presence in the
market and keep your well-deserved Google ranking as well.
What is Distributed Denial of
Service (DDoS) Attack
DDoS is an attack on a network resource by
making it unavailable to its intended users. The motive would generally be to
disrupt hosting services of a provider either temporarily or indefinitely to do
damage to the business.The targets of these attacks are usually high profiled
web servers like banks, credit card companies and root name servers. These are
usually carried out by disgruntled competitors and as a tool for a resistance
movement. It is sometimes referred to as "Internet Street Protest" as
stated by Richard Stallman, a computer programmer and a known activist in the
free software freedom movement.
There are many DDoS attacks that are
capable of bringing networks to its knees. Among the most common ones follow:
1. Flooding the site with useless traffic
or communication that would make the site unable to respond to legitimate
queries. This is otherwise known as the SYN flood attack. An attacker can flood
the server with TCP/CYN without acknowledging the server's CYN's response. The
result is that the session table gets filled up with session queries making it
unable to accept legitimate queries for connection until the inactivity timer
has gone off.
2. ICMP flood attack - is similar to the
CYN flood attack. The only difference is that the attacker dumps a huge number
of ICMP echo request with a counterfeit IP address. This has caused a lot of
sleepless nights to network administrators in the past that it was among the
first ones to have been "killed" through the use of several methods.
3. UDP Flood attack - This is like the ICMP
attack, except that IP packets that contain the UDP datagram are used against
its victims.
4. Land attack - the attacker uses the IP
address of the victim as the source and destination. If the victim is unaware
of the attack, he may end up trying to connect with it and reaching a dead end
loop until it has reached the idle timeout value.
5. Teardrop attack - this type of attack
fragments and reassembles IP packets where an attacker can transmit fragmented
IP packets. These packets contain overlapping fragment offsets to exhaust the
victim's resources in reassembling them.
6. Ping of Death - an ICMP variation that
causes a system to crash. The attacker sends an IP packet that contains more
than the allowable 65,507 bytes of data that causes the system to crash.
What to do?
Regardless of the type of DDoS attack,
current techniques fall short in mitigating the damage that it can wreck at any
given time. Some of the techniques that are used are not optimized to face the
growing sophistication of attacks that are seen today. Firewalls are
rudimentary forms of preventing these occurrences but are not specifically
designed to protect the internal system, against the more advanced types at
present. Other strategies like overprovisioning do not guarantee all out
protection from vicious larger attacks, and are too costly as a prevention
strategy for DDoS.
Businesses with an online presence can
invest in DDoS protection. This type of protection may carry its own cost to
implement it. However, the DDoS solution may have compelling reasons in terms
of future earning streams if solutions for an all out protection is put in
place. It is imperative that large enterprises, government units, and service
providers among others, protect the integrity of their business operations as a
matter of corporate policy, and as a means for market survival.
The author, Consolacion S. Miravite is a
Certified Public Accountant and a licensed Real Estate Broker under HLURB. She
is also a freelance writer and blogger. She has written articles on a number of
niches ranging from: Finance, Accounting, Travel, Real Estate, E-Marketing,
Relationships, Engineering, Lifestyle, Religion, Academe, SEO Marketing, Small
Business, Internet, and many others.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Consolacion_S_Miravite
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