As if optimizing your site for search engines wasn’t hard enough, along come hackers to make things more complicated.

It turns out spammers, scammers and hackers care about search engine optimization (SEO) and ranking on search engine results pages (SERP) too. A study by Google recently found that more than half of malware sites (60 percent!) embed popular keywords to beef up their SERP ranking and share their criminal wares.

But don’t get discouraged; Google and Bing are on to the scam and working hard to ban the malware sites from their indexes. While the search engines do their best detecting, here are two free tools you can use to protect yourself from bad backlinks, or site association.

Web of Trust Tool

Mozilla Firefox offers their Web Of Trust (WOT) Safe Browsing Tool. This is an add-on, not a security upgrade. The tool works with your browser (it’s compatible with more than just Mozilla Firefox) to scan links and sites and rates their trust level with an easy to understand traffic light display. Green means go, a yellow icon means think before you click, and a red light raises a warning screen.

The tool works with Google, Yahoo and Bing search so you can see what links and sites on the SERPs contain malware. It also works with the corresponding email servers (gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail) to protect your personal information and your computer.

SiteAdvisor

McAfee offers SiteAdvisor, their site and link scanning tool. SiteAdvisor also uses the traffic light display, but adds a touch of their branding. The only thing safer than a ‘green light’ (which features a checkmark) rating is a McAfree Secure shield.In the last malware protection post you learn that McAfee has an affiliate program, so if you’re thinking of joining, you should definitely check out their tool.

Twitter Tricks and Fake Facebook Fans

You use social media and social networking sites to help your SEO efforts, and so do hackers and phishers. Phishers, or phishing, refers to the criminally fraudulent process of obtaining personal information (usernames, passwords, credit card info) by pretending to be trustworthy. It’s a term specific to Internet interactions.

The tools mentioned above will detect fishy (and phishy) links, but you need to be hyper-aware and vigilant yourself. Be careful about accepting friend requests, make sure your Facebook privacy settings protect any personal information, and don’t download anything from any unfamiliar site.

Avoid the Worm!
The Koobface worm, a virus that infects your computer with extremely vicious malware, has been known to target social networking sites. Hackers use a message offering a video, and then send you to a site to download a fake multimedia player. It’s during that download the worm infects your machine.

Safety First

It’s not easy operating an online business, there’s a lot you need to be wary of. Taking advantage of reliable (and free) tools and services can help, as does being hyper-aware. Check back with our blog to learn how to grow and protect your business, and think before you click!