As the name suggests, Poetica Marketing is a marketing agency. That’s our space—and we tend to stay rooted in content, design, branding, and websites.
But every now and then, our research-backed approach uncovers massive security issues—and we’re tasked with making recommendations (or calling for backup).
We recently saw a flurry of client security issues, and it inspired us to reflect on two separate issues we’ve run into while conducting SEO audits, which are typically much less exciting.
Case Study 1: A Free SEO Audit Revealed A Sleek Backlink Strategy
Background: At the first Sites, Camera, Action branding and marketing seminar, we offered free SEO audits to anyone who requested them.
The Organization: A nonprofit specializing in secondhand clothes for women who’ve escaped abusive households and relationships.
Our Unexpected Security Finding: Someone had hidden backlinks to nefarious websites in unformatted periods at the bottom of random pages. If you never looked for them, you never would have found them as a user.
Our Actions: Although we’re not a security agency, we:
- Removed the nefarious links.
- Helped the organization update their plugins.
- Introduced the nonprofit to a partner who’d be able to help them increase security and search for malware on an ongoing basis.
The Lessons for Businesses
- Monitor your website for security issues. You can’t find what you’re not looking for.
- What visitors see isn’t necessarily what search engines see. Hidden links can be virtually invisible to normal users while still influencing how Google evaluates your site.
- Audit your outbound links—not just your backlinks. Businesses tend to obsess over who links to them, but unfamiliar links going from your website can be an equally important warning sign.
- Have trusted partners in your network before you really need them. If we hadn’t had a partner to send this nonprofit to, they would have scrambled to find someone who could really meet their needs.
Case Study 2: French Spam Injection Interfering With Page Titles & Meta Descriptions (And Creating 420,000 Fake Pages)
The Organization: A global leader in Colombian spirits.
Our Unexpected Security Finding: Someone had injected code written to trick search engines into reading and indexing unrelated French product descriptions for page titles and meta descriptions. The same code also tricked search engines into listing a French e-commerce company’s logo as the website’s favicon—and created 420,000 fake pages that Google indexed.
Our Actions:
- We stripped the malicious code from the website.
- We increased security measures, including activating a firewall and scheduling weekly malware scans.
- We resubmitted the sitemap and affected pages to Search Console to ensure recrawling and proper, accurate indexing.
- We monitored site updates in Search Console to ensure the fake pages were stripped from the index.
- We confirmed in Bing Webmaster that the issue was limited to Google and hadn’t crossed over into Bing.
The Lessons for Businesses
- Change your passwords regularly, and revoke site access from users who no longer need it.
- Maintain strict security protocols to protect your site from future breaches.
- Run regular audits to understand how users access your site.
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