Major Google Search Vulnerability

Started by certforumz, December 16, 2017, 06:29:39 AM

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certforumz

Faced with Google penalty, some research had been made, and it was found that it is possible to get a web page de-indexed with off page blackhat seo, and the party doing blackhat seo could gain, not for just a few months, but perpetually by doing the same over and again. The study results have been given below:

Assumptions:
Victim site: SiteA
Intermediate site (hacked site?): SiteB
Beneficiary site (hackers site?): SiteC

The following have been observed:
1. As was mentioned earlier, for many searches SiteB was showing in Google search results where our site used to appear. (The corresponding page(s) of SiteA delisted, as far as we can see)
2. When clicked on the google search result, SiteB is forwarding to SiteC, which is in similar category as our site (SiteB is entirely unrelated category)
3. The robots.txt file of SiteB has been completely modified to show SiteA home page navigation links and a few second level pages AS IS, with the only change in URLs that instead of siteA.com/1$, the links are siteB./?htm=1$ where 1$ is the remaining string of the URL and matching exactly with SiteA URL.
4. All the pages of SiteA have been reproduced in SiteB (at least whatever been checked)
5. SiteB is adopting some means of detection, and not forwarding to siteC for some known hosts/IP addresses.

So far, after working thoroughly on SiteA, we could not find any evidence that siteA had been hacked, and hence assuming that this is one instance of search engine vulnerability and nothing much could be done other than filing spam report. Hope to reverse it during the next update!

For complete details, check it out here:
http://www.anandsoft.com/blog/?p=561