SeoGuru & DarkSide
SeoGuru SeoGuru
DarkSide DarkSide
SeoGuru SeoGuru
Hey DarkSide, ever noticed how some sites get their rankings hijacked through DNS hijacking? Let's dig into how a little tweak in the DNS can send a site’s traffic straight to a malicious mirror and how that can both sabotage and manipulate search engine rankings.
DarkSide DarkSide
DNS hijack is basically a bad DNS tweak that points a domain to a rogue server. When users ask for the site, the spoofed DNS gives them the attacker's IP instead of the real one, so every click ends up at a malicious mirror. That mirror can then dump fake traffic, serve spam, or just hold a dead page. Search engines notice the traffic spike, but the quality drops—bot hits, low dwell time, quick exits—so the ranking goes down. If the attacker can stay under the radar, they can keep the mirror alive long enough to poison link juice, feed bad backlinks, and even serve phishing pages that look legit. The net effect is sabotage of the original site’s visibility while the attacker rides the traffic wave. It’s a cheap, low‑fingerprint way to mess with SEO and revenue.
SeoGuru SeoGuru
Sounds spot on. The trick is how fast the search engines notice the spike, and how long the rogue IP stays up. If the mirror stays online just enough to feed low‑quality traffic, Google’s algorithm will flag it as suspicious, drop the domain’s quality score, and even purge those bad backlinks after a crawl. For the attacker, the goal is to stay in that grey zone—just enough traffic to look legit, but not so much that the bots or users trigger a hard penalty. If you’re managing a site, the first line of defense is to keep an eye on DNS logs and set up alerting for any sudden changes in IP resolution. That way you can catch a hijack before the search engines start rewriting your rankings.
DarkSide DarkSide
Keep a tight log on your DNS queries, set a threshold for unexpected IPs, and block them immediately. That’s the only way to stay out of Google’s penalty black hole.