Have you found your website being ranked for those products and services that you don’t offer? Then stay alert; you might have caught up in the trap of bait and switch hacking.
Such hacking is going on since years and many times Google has succeeded in overcoming them for a short span of time. So, what exactly is bait and switch hacking? Let’s have a brief overview about the same:
An Overview of Bait and Switch Hacking:
Generally, when a hacker gets access to any website and it starts publishing pages on such topics that are unrelated to that site then such hacking is called as Bait and Switch hacking.
N number of links can be injected related to a topic in some of the pages. When the browser clicks on the links, these are redirected to JavaScript from the hacked site to the other one.
Hackers earn money from affiliate fees for the click and they may gain from various ads on the pages they redirect to.
How this works?
Using this hacking technique; one can gain access to a site and start publishing pages on those topics that are different from the category managed by that particular website. Sometimes, the site owners even may not be aware of this thing.
The hackers can leverage authority of the sites that they hack. The concept is to publish such content on a well ranked site rather than trying to publish it on new site. This image will show you this hacking:
This website “bitcoinspot.nl is not a website about games. Instead, it contains information about Bitcoin. However, hackers were able to access it and then this link related to free download of games was inserted.
More than 300 pages were added to this site by hackers and all were related to free game downloads.
Further, they had added links which can be seen only by Google and not human beings in the home page of any site.
The result was hackers gained top ranking and all these pages were taken by other websites. The actual content was seen only by Google. Human beings were redirected to another site via JavaScript.
Hackers then earn money from affiliate fees for the click. They also gain a lot from the ads on the pages they redirect to. Those ads are sometimes powered by Google AdSense.
Is this Spamming Technique New?
No, this is technique that is been used since years. There were many defences developed by Google against this spamming practice. However, over the past two months; something has changed and as a result, this technique has started working again.
The issue has been reported to Google and as soon as there are any news related to it. These will be shared definitely with our readers.
Wind Up:
Be aware of this spamming technique and try to find out ways to save your website from hackers. In case you find such thing happening with your site then you can report the issue to Google.
Hope you liked this post and got some useful information. For more such details, stay tuned to Platinum SEO; SEO in Melbourne where experts are always available to meet the needs of clients.