Spam can wreak havoc with your law firm, in more ways than you might think. The junk cluttering your email inbox, the time wasted when your IT department has to fix a damage done by spam, the investment in technology necessary to continue to combat spam; that’s just for starters. Think about this: spam poses a real threat to your website’s Google analytics.
And what if spam is not seen as spam by Google, but as black hat SEO?
Fake traffic skews analytics. It can happen pretty quickly, and you may not realize it at first. Your website traffic is growing steady and then, traffic takes off like a rocket. You think, wow, that article I published in the bar journal must have really gotten a lot of interest. But the calls to your office don’t align with the jump in analytics. A closer look reveals that all of the traffic is coming from one website, and it’s not a website you know. It’s spam.
Referral spam is profitable for hackers. Spammers target large numbers of websites to find vulnerable sites. They spam your site to show that their URL is sending many referrals, with the goal of building their own website’s traffic. Often they are paid based on the number of links or referrals they generate.
Spam can overload your computer system and compromise security. It’s hard to imagine that hackers would want to launch a DoS (Denial of Service) attack on a lone law firm, but that’s why so many security systems are in place. A DoS attack makes your website unusable and crushes your firewalls. The goal is to exhaust technical resources. The result is legitimate users can’t get to your site.
Smart hackers lead to smarter systems professionals. At IMS, we are always on the lookout for improved solutions, and that includes website protection. Today there is a new class of captchas—those small boxes at the bottom of forms that require you to type in randomly generated codes are no longer state of the art. We’re not sharing what it is we are using, but with systems that automatically detect spam bots on forms, we prevent spammers from getting near our client’s forms.
At IMS, we build websites to shield our clients from the impact of spam. With the help of trained end users—you and your team—your data and your systems are in good hands! If you have any concerns about spam and your estate planning and Elder Law website, submit a support ticket.