New Negative SEO Attack Using Google

[validseo]

Someone has started using this attack against my sites. It is quite effective at killing my organic revenue from Google Web Search... hopefully Google will close this one up fast.

The way it works is that the attacker does a brute force DOS on the web server (leaving connections open and swamping the server socket on port 80) while googlebot is crawling the site. Googlebot marks nearly all the pages as 404 or 500 errors in webmaster tools. Then Google pulls all the failed pages out of the search results.

I know. I know... How do they know when googlebot is crawling my site? This only works if it happens while googlebot is crawling the site. They monitor my URLs in the google cache and as soon as one updates a timestamp they know googlebot is on the site.

It took me forever to connect the dots that the DOS attacks that only last about 1-2 hours every 2-3 weeks only impact organic traffic from google... I should have caught that sooner, but heck... I didn't expect google to leave huge gaping flaws like this open for exploitation. The effect is 5+ days of totally crippled organic traffic from Google.

I don't know what keywords they are targetting but I am guessing that when I fall out of the SERPs someone else is moving up by default. Then they just repeat as needed until they get to where they want to be.

 

[GuJJuFreak]

What hosting are you using?

 

[validseo]

We have a rack of servers on an OC3... We'd need to get a BigIP balancer (or similar) to thwart this kind of attack... We'd need to spend $50K to prevent $3-5K per month in losses... Google should not update the public cache pages until the day after.

 

[TrevorB]

Man people will do just about anything. Do they have nothing better to do than screw with others?

 

[prab1996]

get a cache service like "MaxCDN".

you'r site will become better.

(there are many services like cloudflare etc etc )
-=-

 

[validseo]

Already have most assets hosted on amazon's CDN... the problem is that you can easily swamp a server socket by using code that doesn't close or timeout the connection. Only takes a single computer to do it... need special stuff to identify attacks like this and stop them before impacting the web server's ability to respond. We handle loads of millions of visitors per day normally. DOS attacks are totally different problem.

The DOS doesn't ever request CDN assets. It only targets our web server.

Update: Looked at both MaxCDN and cloudflare two minutes ago... the service level needed on both for my sites is around $5k/month ... so going that route would still cost over $50k/year to solve this.

The real solution is that google needs to not tip off when googlebot is crawling a site.

 

[kbklash]

Oh.That's really horrible you are facing there.is there anyway you'd close that gap within your server ?Better talk to your hosting provider to offer you DDOS or Dos Attack protection.Its always paid options and the free strategy is using cloudflare nameserver for your site.If the attack happens again then you might wanna get protection service providers like Vistnet.

 

[citizenx28]

seriously people who does all these negative stuffs should end up in some fucking mental hospital.
can't believe they spend so much time on how to screw other's website rather than working on their own website.

 

[TryOG]

Wasn't there a way to turn off Google cache?

(So the attackers don't know when the bots are crawling.)

Maybe adding this to your page could disable it:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE" />

 

[bartosimpsonio]

There are anti-ddos services out there, I believe Cloudflare is a popular choice.

 

[validseo]

Wasn't there a way to turn off Google cache?

(So the attackers don't know when the bots are crawling.)

Maybe adding this to your page could disable it:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE" />

This might be the best option... I've read that Bing starts complaining if you add this. Google claims it is safe to use:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35256?hl=en

If you don't want searchers to be able to access a cached version of your page, use the noarchive meta tag like this:


<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">


The page will still be crawled and indexed by Google, but users will not see a Cached link in the search results.

I like the price... and there is no value to me for google offering cached copies of my pages.

 

[TheUnborn]

Very sorry to hear that and pissed off with all these NSEO bastards,hope you find a solution fast.

 

[Calum Jones]

It makes me really angry that people out there actually bother doing this. It's no different from walking into a family-run store and burning it to the ground. You completely screw up somebody's life and income, your actions may prevent them from feeding their family. Well done, you'll get your come uppance one day.

Just the other day some c**t in Ukraine was trying to hack into my website. Wordfence gave me the heads up so I put a perma-block on his IP but dickheads like that don't give up he'll be back in a few days with more brute forcers and f*ck knows what else to try and destroy my financial stability in life so he can make $5 more each month on his nonsencical website before it gets rightfully de-indexed for being utter sh*t.

Only a truly talentless dickhead would have to turn to destroying his 10 competitor's sites and income because his is too crap to actually get any ranking. Is it not bad enough that we have to fear Google algorithm updates? Now we have to fear malicious evil b*stards too?