BotID uncovers hidden SEO poisoning
By Steven Van ·
BotID helped a major financial institution trace a years-old SEO poisoning attack still surfacing spam pages in Google search results.
A large financial institution deploying Vercel's BotID expected to catch malicious scrapers behind a traffic spike. Instead, the bot activity traced back to verified Google crawlers, including Googlebot and Google AdsBot.
The queries those crawlers were fetching had nothing to do with the institution's business. Investigating further, the team found a years-old SEO poisoning attack still generating traffic: spam and scam pages, indexed under the site's domain, being crawled and served in search results long after the initial compromise.
The institution used BotID's invisible CAPTCHA to cut the bot traffic surge and pin down the sources behind it.
