SEO Spam: 7 Tips to Protect Your Website

Many small businesses invest in SEO services to improve search rankings, expand website visibility, and attract more organic traffic. That increased focus on SEO also makes SMBs a popular target for SEO spam, a type of cyberattack that can damage search visibility, hurt user trust, and create long-term ranking problems if it is not caught early.

This type of attack has become increasingly common. Search rankings can make or break a small business, so understanding how to strengthen SEO security and prevent SEO spam attacks is a must.

What is SEO spam?

SEO spam, also called spamdexing, refers to deceptive tactics used to manipulate search engine rankings. In many cases, hackers inject spammy content, hidden links, or malicious code into legitimate websites to boost their own rankings or drive traffic to low-quality, scam, or malware-filled pages.

For the targeted website, this can create serious problems. It can damage search visibility, send visitors to unsafe pages, hurt user trust, and make the site appear unreliable to search engines.

The term “spamdexing” combines “spam” and “indexing.” Search engines like Google index web pages so they can appear in search results. Spammers exploit that process by adding content or links meant for search engines to crawl, often in ways that normal visitors may never notice.

How do SEO spammers attack your website?

Hackers rely on a variety of methods to launch these attacks. They might insert malicious links into existing web pages, create new pages full of spammy content, or use website redirects to send your visitors to a phishing or malware-infected site.

The easiest entry point is often blog post comment fields, where cybercriminals use black hat SEO tactics to deploy bots and leave spammy comments at scale. These comments resemble a hacked website and can discourage visitors from doing business with you. It can also signal to search engines that your site has poor quality controls.

What do SEO spammers get from these attacks? They use your site's domain name and authority to improve their own search engine rankings by stealing traffic from other sites.

Common types of SEO spam

SEO spam attacks take several forms, including:

• Keyword stuffing: Spammers pack web pages with search terms repeated far beyond any natural reading pattern. The goal is to manipulate a page’s relevance in search results. The content often looks nonsensical to human visitors but is designed to mislead search engines.
• Hidden text and hidden links: Attackers use CSS or HTML tricks to place text or spam links on your web page in a way that is difficult for human visitors to see. A common method is to set the font color to match the page background. Search engine crawlers may still read it, which can associate your site with low-quality or malicious content you never approved.
• Cloaking: This tactic involves showing different content to search engine crawlers than to human visitors. In an SEO spam attack, hackers may hide injected spam from site owners while showing search engines spammy keywords, links, or pages.
• Link spam and link farming: Spammers may inject links into your pages, add spam links through comments, or connect your site to low-quality link networks. If your site becomes part of that activity, it can hurt search visibility and increase the risk of ranking losses or manual actions.
• Comment spam: Bots flood blog comments and forums with irrelevant links and content. These comments damage the user experience, generate low-quality backlinks, and can signal that your site lacks proper controls.
• Injected pages: Attackers exploit vulnerabilities in your CMS, themes, or plugins to add entirely new pages to your site. These pages often advertise pharma products, fake eCommerce goods, or malicious downloads while using your site's authority to rank in search results.

What are signs your site may already have spamdexing?

These attacks are often designed to stay hidden from website owners while remaining fully visible to search engines. Check for these red flags:

• Google Search Console shows search queries, indexed pages, or backlinks that are unrelated to your business, such as pharma or gambling keywords.
• Your Google rankings or organic traffic drop without a clear reason.
• Visitors report being redirected to a web page they did not expect.
• Your antivirus or website security scanner flags malicious content on your site.
• New pages appear in Google’s index that you did not create.
• Referral traffic spikes in ways that do not match your marketing activity.

If you spot any of these, scan your site immediately, remove infected files, and reach out to a website security expert, like SiteLock, if you need additional help.

7 tips to improve your SEO security

Negative SEO attacks don’t just tank your website’s rankings — they hurt your credibility with customers and visitors. Furthermore, they open up other pages of your site to security breaches and can even cause search engines to flag or blacklist your site.

To prevent cybercriminals from sinking your rankings and eroding your credibility, strengthen your website’s SEO security with the following steps:

1. Update your software and plugins.

Outdated software and security plugins on your website can create vulnerabilities that cybercriminals can exploit, so it’s important to keep your content management system’s software current. As a best practice, site owners can perform routine checks to ensure all software is up-to-date and check whether security patches are complete. It’s also a good idea to remove applications you don’t need: The more complex your site (and the more you rely on applications created by third-party developers), the higher your security risk.

2. Use strong passwords.

If you own a WordPress site or similar platform, be sure to use a strong password and two-factor authentication (2FA) for login. Brute force attacks can attempt to guess your password by trying the most popular passwords until it guesses correctly. Hackers can also figure out your password by finding clues on social media and trying different combinations until successful. For example, children’s names, pet names, the city where you were born, etc.

3. Sanitize input fields.

As a best practice, you should always sanitize input fields to protect your site from bad bots and prevent cybercriminals from inserting modified queries. These modified queries can lead to a much larger security issue, such as a data breach. To sanitize input fields, predefine what a user can enter into a text box. For example, phone number fields should allow users to enter only numbers, parentheses, and hyphens.

4. Use a CAPTCHA.

Even if you haven’t heard the term before, you are likely familiar with a CAPTCHA; it’s the variety of images with a theme you need to correctly select to log in to your account or make a payment on many websites. Essentially, a CAPTCHA is a test that computers use to distinguish human website visitors from bots. By applying one to your website’s login, account sign-up forms, and eCommerce checkouts, you can stop cybercriminals from deploying bots to fill your website with SEO spam.

5. Setup and monitor Google Search Console.

Setting up Google Search Console is not only good for tracking search engine results, but it’s also good for monitoring security issues. Search Console will show alerts when it appears the site’s security has been compromised. You can also keep track of what search terms your site ranks for. If you begin seeing terms unrelated to your business, such as around viagra, Cialis, or other pharma-related products, you are likely the target of search engine spam. Lastly, you typically get alerts if your site has received a large number of spammy links.

6. Keep track of backlink profiles.

Building low-quality spam links and redirects is a typical way cybercriminals carry out negative SEO attacks, so it’s crucial to keep track of these items on your website. As a best practice, use SEO monitoring tools that can track backlinks and keywords to help you quickly detect when a cybercriminal is creating malicious redirects to your site.

7. Install a web application firewall (WAF).

Lastly, you can block bad bots from deploying spammy comments on your website by installing a WAF. When evaluating WAF options, make sure the solution you choose includes a built-in CAPTCHA as an added layer of security. The WAF acts as a gatekeeper for your website and blocks the top security threats before they ever reach your site.

Prevent SEO spamming with SiteLock

Building up your business’s search rankings takes a lot of work and is an investment for your business. Don’t let SEO spam, bad bots, or hidden security issues put that visibility at risk.

SiteLock’s website security plans help protect your website with automated scanning, threat detection, and a clear Site Health score that shows where your security stands. With Prioritized Tasks, you can see which vulnerabilities, malware risks, and setup gaps need attention first, so you know exactly what to fix before small issues become bigger problems.

Strengthen your website security, protect your organic visibility, and keep your small business safer.

Monique Becenti is a product and channel marketing specialist at SiteLock, a cloud-based website security provider currently protecting more than 16 million websites globally. Monique is passionate about improving the customer experience for all. SiteLock’s combination of dedicated research and developmental efforts, aggressive product road maps, and access to a massive global data set make the company a leading innovator in web security.