How Proxy Hacking Can Hurt Your Rankings & What To Do About It

Aug 16, 2007 at 1:01pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google Proxy Hacking: How A Third Party Can Remove Your Site From Google SERPs by Dan Thies gives us a detailed look at the serious dangers of proxy hacking.

Dan’s detailed article shows the history on how he discovered the issue. He then goes into why the hacking currently works in Google. Dan is eager to encourage the search engines to do something about the issue. But Dan has provided details on how to help protect yourself with the help of some friends.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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3 COMMENTS ON How Proxy Hacking Can Hurt Your Rankings & What To Do About It

der parallax, August 17th, 2007 at 5:27 pm ET:

Very curious, the silence thus far on this important piece of tech whistle blowing that several of you all have been sitting on for so long.

Are we all so deeply in bed with big G that we can’t talk real about such a huge issue that - seemingly - Google cannot or will not address?

Are the SERPS growing so un-important to their business model? I don’t think so. It’s still the reason millions of ours and theirs customers google every day of their lives.

What’s up searcherati? Speak.

Thom

Danny Sullivan, August 19th, 2007 at 1:29 pm ET:

Thom, my “part” in all this wasn’t really that silent. It’s been very public that search engines have had issues with redirections or duplicates “hijacking” listings. No one has really been sitting on this at all. We’ve had open forums on this for well over a year, tons of articles and more. What’s new in what Dan described, even to me, was mainly that you’ve got proxies that are even harder to combat by using DNS lookups to verify spiders.

GadgetsGuy, August 28th, 2007 at 4:35 am ET:

I received an IM from a friend tonight who was quite distraught about a website he had received a link to

http://www.serptimized.com

I had glanced over something Site Pro News had sent me a couple days ago about this, but did not pay it alot of attention.

Tonight I decided to see what my friend was fussing about, and I am astounded to say the least that Google has let something like this go on for so long!

How serious of a threat is this stuff, and is it something we need to secure our sites against? What about blogs with content updated several times a day?

I own hundreds of domains, so if this crap is real, then it looks like my summer vacation is going to be cut really short.

Different sites have many different takes on just how much of a problem this really is, so I am looking for the most common denominator from as many SEO sites as I can find.

Thanks!

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