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I have repaired some problems that FreeDV.org was suffering due to
security attacks by SEO companies. The next time someone offers to
improve how your company appears in search engines, please consider
what's been happening to us. The SEO vandals had the goal of getting links to their customers sites from FreeDV.org . Search engines count the links to a site from other sites, so such links would tend present their customers sites closer to the top when a search engine presents the results of a search. To get these links, they created a program that searched for tikiwiki sites, and then registered logins on those sites. This program seems to run on many computers, perhaps some of them are home computers that have been suborned into a botnet. The program correctly decoded the capcha (perhaps with human assistance, I don't know), confirmed the email addresses properly, and then posted comments on the site. The content of the comments was pseudorandom, the only important thing in them was the links. So, I turned off comments when I saw this happening a while back, and that stopped the presentation of ilicit links. I later upgraded to a new version of tikiwiki, which gives a hint to search engines to ignore links from the wiki when grading sites. But we were still getting the ilicit logins. I removed 20,000 logins. No kidding. I added a passcode to prevent new ones from being created by robots. But the program kept hitting my site, and the new login registration function was the most-frequently-served page of my web server. I finally had to change the URL of the registration function to keep the program from loading down my web server. When you get those spams from companies that promise to improve your search engine results, this is what they are doing. There are legitimate search engine optimization companies out there, but there are enough black hats that you should evaluate candidates _very_ carefully before you hire them. Thanks Bruce |
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