October 2, 2024
Websites are the lifeblood of most businesses these days. But the online landscape is fraught with risks, and website hijacking is a growing concern. And with legacy site monitoring services, this can easily be missed and your site can continue to be reported as “Up” while under the control of bad actors.
Keyword monitoring is a proactive approach to safeguarding your online presence. It involves regularly scanning your website’s content for hidden specific keywords, phrases, or code snippets which when undetected is a reliable clue that your site has been compromised.
Website hijacking is when cybercriminals infiltrate your site and replace its content with malicious or fraudulent material. These hackers can create replica websites that look just like yours, luring unsuspecting visitors into their schemes. Traditional monitoring methods often fail to detect such hijacking attempts because the website still appears to be up and running. This is where keyword monitoring becomes invaluable. By monitoring specific keywords or code snippets unique to your website, it acts as a virtual guard, on continuous patrol. If a hacker attempts to infiltrate and make unauthorized changes, keyword monitoring raises the alarm.
The key advantage of keyword monitoring is its proactive nature. Traditional website monitoring services often rely on checking the website's availability and responsiveness. While these are essential aspects of site maintenance, they don't necessarily detect unauthorized changes in content.
Site Qwality's keyword monitoring goes far beyond basic detection with three powerful capabilities that set us apart:
Don't just monitor for what SHOULD be there - monitor for what SHOULDN'T disappear. Set alerts when critical content like copyright notices, legal disclaimers, or trust badges are removed from your site. This is invaluable for compliance monitoring and detecting when hackers remove security indicators to make their fraudulent site appear more legitimate.
Protect your brand identity by enforcing proper capitalization. Detect when "YourBrand" is changed to "yourbrand" - a subtle change that could indicate tampering or unauthorized modifications. This precision is crucial for brand protection and detecting sophisticated attacks that try to blend in.
For power users and security professionals, regex enables pattern-based detection that can identify entire categories of threats. Monitor for any email address pattern, phone number format, credit card number pattern, or create custom patterns to detect injection attempts and sophisticated attacks. This forensic-level capability is typically only found in enterprise security tools - we include it in all our plans.
While some services offer basic keyword monitoring as a premium feature at a premium price point, what is the value in reporting your site as up and running if it's in the hands of a hacker?
We believe that your site maintenance should be all or nothing. And we reflect that in our one-subscription model, giving you all the features needed to monitor and protect your website no matter how many websites you need to monitor - including advanced features like negative search, case-sensitivity, and regex that competitors charge extra for.