|
Do hackers hijack your search engine listings?
Are your search engine rankings still yours? Other people
might hijack your search engine rankings and they might steal
your web site visitors. The worst thing is that you might
not even notice it.
Are you losing visitors without knowing it?
Imagine your web site URL is listed in the search engine
results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Most people that click
on your URL in the search engine results are sent to your
web site.
However, some people that click on your web site URL are
sent to a totally unrelated web site that has nothing to
do with your site.
Although your web site URL is displayed in the browser,
people see a totally different site that has nothing to
do with you or your company.
How do these hackers steal your visitors?
The hackers exploit a flaw in the software of some domain
name servers (DNS). The hackers send incorrect information
to these DNS server so that the server redirects the traffic
for the URLs to another site.
If the DNS server does not validate that the information
has come from an authoritative source it will send visitors
to the wrong pages. That means that people who enter your
URL in the web browser will be sent to the hacker's pages
instead of your pages.
How can you protect your web site?
It's important that you use a reliable host that does
not use an open DSN server. Go to www.dnsreport.com and
enter the URL of your web site. You should see PASS in
the Open DNS servers line. If your domain name
fails the test, you should contact your web host.
Using a secure DNS server is crucial if you don't want to
expose your web site to hackers. If your web host cannot
fix the DNS problems, you should use a new
web host.
Note that a secure DNS server only makes sure that no-one
hijacks your search engine rankings. To get high search engine
rankings, you must make
sure that search engines can parse your web pages and
that you have many inbound
links that tell search engines that your web site is
important.
|
