Search Engine Ranking Attacks

Overview of the attack

In a search engine ranking attack an attacker attempts to affect the victim site’s rating in search engines. This allows the attacker to reduce traffic to the target site.

What makes a site vulnerable?

All sites which rely on search engines for some or all of their traffic are potentially at risk. A site does not itself need to be vulnerable in order to be affected by the attacks. Instead it is the search engine sites and their data which are targeted by the attacker.

Impact of the attack

The primary impact of the attack will be to lower your ranking in search engines and thereby affect the number of hits your site receives. There may also be other impacts, for instance your reduced rating may allow an attacker to place a site critical of or competing with yours higher in the rankings, which will tend to further harm traffic levels and profitability.

Preventing the attack

To prevent the attack, it is necessary to identify potential techniques an attacker could use to affect your ranking and put in place measures to block these techniques. An example of one such technique is the Google proxy hack.