One of my team recently noticed that one of our campaigns was suffering in the search engine rankings. Whilst investigating, he found out that every page of the site had hundreds of irrelevant and hidden links at the bottom of the source code of every page. The links were hidden by a style sheet setting. The site had been hacked.

I wanted to know if it was an issue with just my client's website, or if other websites hosted on the same server had also been compromised. In order to investigate this we performed a reverse IP DNS lookup using the tool at:

http://www.seologs.com/ip-domains.html

Then we looked at the source code of other sites hosted on the same IP address and lo and behold - lots of them had been hacked too. Some unscrupulous black hat link builder has been out compromising sites in order to build their link popularity.

The moral of the story being - keep an eye on your site - you never know what's going to happen next. If I were a salesperson I might use this opportunity to talk about the importance of a managed search engine marketing company.... but I think I'd better stick to what I know best!