Oh! So, you thought hackers only stole passwords on bank accounts and credit card numbers? If yes, you have arrived late on the current scenario but nevertheless better late than never! Before we start about protecting, let yourself know how the hackers actually steal the Pageranks!!

One of the common methods used by hackers is to redirect a website to a completely different one. By doing so, the new website to which the earlier website is directed gets all the visits and clicks that’s actually supposed to be for the redirected website! This kind of hacking is common and can be easily detected too. However, there’s another method used currently by hackers that’s quite a nut to crack.

Here, only the search engine crawlers are redirected to a different website. They do it in a way that makes it look like the pages of a website, which are moved to a different domain name. Now, search engines work mechanically and thus, when it encounters such redirects it’s more likely to pass the ‘value’ to the new website. The same implies to the pageranks too, thus, resulting in a huge loss to the original website. The hackers here snatch away all the effort of the webmaster built up over a span of time in just few days! A bigger disadvantage of this method (to the genuine websites) is that it is hard to detect or notice it. Only the search engine crawlers get redirected and nothing seems to be changed to the webmaster or an average user.

So, now that you know the mechanism used lets get our hands on the counter mechanism. One of the first symptoms of the hacking method is that your URL’s are no more indexed by the search engines. It’s quite hard to detect this, as no one actually keeps checking the indexing everyday and further, this ‘not indexing of URL’s’ can be due to several other reasons. So, how do we make sure that it’s because of this bug called hacking?

Firstly, get your website accessed with a search engine crawler user agent. The agent shows you a rough graph of how your website reacts to search engine crawlers. This may not be accurate but indeed, it gives some valuable approximate insight onto the current relation between your website and search engine crawlers. Here are three easier ways for you to go about with the tracking process:

1. Try out websniffer- It’s an online tool that works pretty much the same like a search engine crawler and is quite easy to use too.
2. You can even try using Firefox with the user agent switcher plug-in. The use of this plug-in actually means that you would have to add the user agent yourself (The current Googlebot User string can be used for this purpose).
3. If you are good with console tools, then ‘wget’ should be your bet.
4. These tools, spots and lets you know about such redirects or any other related issues. Cloaking of IP address can actually trick these tools too, but cloaking isn’t usually done in such hacks and in case, cloaking is employed you might just have to find out some other better methods!!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 3:10 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.