Hacking cases and malware cases are at an all-time high in India and Asia in general. There are several ways a hacker can access your website, but the sneakiest way is via proxy hacking. It’s a cyber-attack technique aiming to replace legitimate web pages in search engine indexes and search results pages to direct traffic to spoofed websites.
How Proxy Hacking Works
In the worst case, an attacker could use proxy hacking to infect your site’s visitors with malware or other viruses. In less malicious instances, the attacker could be trying to gain an advantage over competitors or generate advertising revenue by redirecting traffic to their fraudulent websites.
There are two main ways an attacker can duplicate content. One is to use a malicious web proxy that redirects visitors to another site, and the other is to clone the target’s content directly.
- Website cloning
Firstly, hackers clone a top-ranking web page and attempt to get a higher SEO rank than the original page. The attacker’s goal is to trick an innocent internet user into visiting a fake website instead of the original one. This can be done for the simple purpose of earning advertising revenue or paid referral links from stolen content.
In such instances, hackers create a malicious web proxy that points to the victim’s landing page. The hacker then creates a link to a different URL that’s a copy of the original site’s content. When search engine indexers check links to proxies, they assume they have the same content as the victim’s page. Alternatively, a hacker could attempt to deliver viruses to the victim’s device through the mock site.
- Redirecting website visitors
Another form of proxy hacking is an attempt at redirecting traffic from a victim’s site to a different one. In this case, the hacker finds a way to change a small part of their victim’s URL and move the traffic to the new site.
The corrupted link can either lead to a site with similar content to the original website or be a link to potential malware. In the first instance, the intention would be to gain more traffic and increase SEO for the new site.
Regardless of the method used, a hacker will try to rank their site higher than the original site on Google Search or other search engines.
How To Keep Away From Proxy Hacking
There is no way to completely protect your website from proxy hacks and duplicate content. But by following safe SEO practices, businesses can prevent proxy hacks and reduce their effectiveness.
- Website owners can increase the authority of their domains to make it harder for hijackers to rank up. This means using white hat SEO optimization. High-quality keywords, links, and sitemaps can help clarify canonical links and reduce the impact of URL hijacking attempts.
- Organizations should protect their domains from automated content scraping. This means blocking malicious bots and spiders from accessing your site.
- Website owners should also conduct regular SEO audits. These can reveal potential proxy hacking attempts and allow the owners a chance to combat such attempts.
- Additionally, if a website owner suspects that the website has been hacked, they should look for phrases that are unique or nearly unique to their content. A website should stand out in search results. However, if you see duplicates of this content, it may be a cloned page.
- The website owner can also look for suspicious URLs. Cloned URLs tend to look different than the actual page. They often contain full links to another domain. Look for strange occurrences such as HTTPS// or www in the middle or end of the URL instead of at the beginning.
- The relevant institutions should also educate the public on how to identify rogue websites and avoid getting affected by these sites.
Find a Good Proxy Provider
Although proxy hacking imposes several threats to your website, a more significant concern is your website’s SEO ranking and reach. This is especially true for business websites. You can try several methods to improve your SEO ranking, including localized research that allows you to target the right market.
At IPRoyal, you can get premium residential proxy servers to boost your web scraping efforts. With a reliable scraping setup, access to data is made easier and more orderly, allowing for accurate information and easier analysis to inform your business decisions.
Following the tips mentioned and hiring the right proxy provider will boost your website’s performance and reduce your chances of getting hacked.
