There are a few ways to learn how to check if spammers abuse your website if you are a website owner and wish to prohibit those hackers and spammers from tearing up your website. To get started, it is important to know what kinds of signs to look for to learn how to check if spammers abuse your website. Ultimately, it is also important to learn how to protect your website from spammers and hackers.
Cloaking is a form of spamming that is a very common way that spammers will use their tricks to break into your website. Spammers will often use cloaking to break into websites that have a high search ranking on search engines like Google.

Cloaking works when the content presented to the search engine spider is actually different than what is shown to the regular users who visit your site. The spammers are able to do this because they deliver content based on the user agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. This can happen a few different ways. For example, when a user is identified as a search engine spider, the server side script will actually deliver an entirely different version of the web page. The search engine spider is able to be identified based on the IP address as well as on the user-agent HTTP header. So when a user comes from a certain page like a Google search page, the web server gives that user a different version of the page then what they would get if they typed the website address directly into the URL of the page in the browser.

There are other ways spammers can abuse your website. Because so many websites will unfortunately have security holes and other possible weak links, spammers will take advantage of those weak spots and will hack into your server to change the content of your web pages. They can do a few things to your website once they are able to break in. For example, they may break into your coding, change the coding or keywords to get the website to redirect to one of their websites or pages. Because these links will only be visible to Google’s indexing spider or that of another similar search engine, it is easily redirected to another site because for Google it looks like your website is actually endorsing the spammer website with a link.

Now that you understand the ways spammers abuse your website if they can, it is important to learn how to check if spammers abuse your website so you can know what to look for an how to stop them. First, it might be a good idea to download the free IBP demonstration version or a similar tool. This type of tool will allow you to enter the URL of your website and select Googlebot. The spider simulator will then allow you to see exactly how a Google spider will show you how Google actually sees your website. This is a great method to use to check if someone returns different pages based on the user-agent. You can also check if spammers abuse your website just by doing a manual Google search yourself. You should try searching your own website via Google or another search engine every few days to make sure you are being directed to your own website and how it should look correctly.

You can also try clicking on the cached link on Google search result pages for your domain to see the content that Google has indexed on your pages. From this point, you can look for links, Javascript or other elements that you did not put on your website.

There are a few ways you can protect your website from these spammers abusing your website. First, it is important to make sure you have up-to-date virus protection on your own computer so you can protect your server from that direction. It is also important to do these above mentioned regular checks on your website regularly, at least once a week depending on how much you change your content and post new information on your website. It is also a good idea to always use the latest version of your content management system from your web host or CMS to protect your website. Having the latest version means you will also be able to get the latest security updates for your web server. If you are still finding that you have regular problems with spammers, it might be the fault of your web host provider. If this is the case, it might be a good idea to consider switching web hosting companies to find a company that is more secure and reliable for your website security needs. Knowing and understanding how to check if spammers abuse your website is just one of the many important tasks you need to undertake as a website administrator.