SEO hackers – the three ways to tell if your site has been link hacked

If you’ve followed our blog over the past few months, you will have noticed a lot of posts relating to sites being hacked for the purposes of search engine optimisation.   This is a relatively new phenomenon and gaining in frequency.

One of our SEO CDM’s (Kerry Dye) has just had an article published in the March issue of Network Security Newsletter – called "Website abuse for search engine optimisation".  You can register to get a free issue on their website or you can view the specific article on ScienceDirect.com.

In case you may be concerned about your own site, here are three ways that will help you tell if you have been "link hacked":

1. Visual check – obvious perhaps, but regularly check your site’s homepage and make sure that nothing is out of place.  One of our clients recently was the victim of an attack that did not involve their own site at all, but the tracking code of their 3rd party analytics tool.  The javascript was modified so that any visitor was redirected to an adsensespammer site somewhere… this was naturally picked up and corrected very quickly.

2. Source code check – most of the time, hacker attacks involve the addition of source code that may not be visible on the rendered page.  They add some additional H

Related Posts

1. Hackers and SEO
2. High Profile websites get hacked
3. Google cares about your hacked website- kind of
4. Hackers Don’t Deface Sites Any Longer
5. Linking? Who should I link to? And who should I allow to link to me?
6. Site load speed and ViewState code
7. Analysis of SEO-Hacked Sites
8. Link farm SEO Hacking Reaches Australia

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 11:43 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.