How Erectile Dysfunction Led to Website Dysfunction

TL;DR: Don’t ignore ranking for weird keywords, it could be a cyber attack.

When you think of cybersecurity, what comes up? Maybe Viagra will come to mind, especially after hearing about one hospital’s story of a successful child surgery getting injected with dozens of links for the erectile dysfunction medication.

Yes, really. Take a look.

Screenshot of hospital website article with toxic links revealed.

Everything in red is a Viagra link. The rest is a heartwarming story about a toddler’s successful surgery.

– A hospital’s article, as seen through the eyes of Google’s algorithm

That’s how one compelling story sounded on a hospital site.

Not only did it sound odd to readers, Google’s search engine, and our healthcare SEO audit team, the article indicated there were security issues that could harm the page’s performance.

Insecure links on their website left the door open for someone to insert Viagra links into this 10-year-old article. If one page on a whole website doesn’t have the HTTPS protocol enabled, then it’s unencrypted enough to pose a threat to the whole site. In most cases, Google issues warnings to anyone about to go to a website that’s only HTTP instead of HTTPS. Without that secure encryption, one bad actor can interrupt a heartwarming story to tell their own Viagra ad.

This isn’t the first time we’ve run across Viagra advertisements where they shouldn’t be (and it might not be the last.)

Backlinks or external links are one factor for deciding how authoritative a website is — and stealthily planting a link to your site from an already authoritative website can seem like a good way to boost an illegitimate website.

That said, backlinks are not the most important ranking factor. They’re not even in the top three, according to Google exec Gary Illyes. Yet, they can carry some influence for the algorithm — and the more authoritative a website is, the more tempting it may be to slip a link in. That’s why hospitals, doctors and other professionals should make sure their website stays secure.

It may seem like a harmless prank, yet the truth is that a less-than-credible site is trading on your reputation to boost themselves.

Pero SEO set to work clearing out the links and putting the right protection in place for the hospital’s website. Website security issues can be simple to cause and hard to correct. In the end, the effort to protect your website from getting hijacked will pay off in your own site’s credibility as well as in the eyes of anyone unfortunate enough to find those links.

How secure is your website? We can’t promise a magic pill that’ll make your cybersecurity issues go away. Instead, Pero SEO can offer a comprehensive review and diagnosis, as well as the next action steps to take so that your site stays up, healthy and protected from hacks.

Add Pero SEO as a preferred source to your Google searches to find more healthcare marketing strategies.