Has your website been hacked? Find out with Vertical Leap's free external link checker (14/02/08)

Vertical Leap, the leading search engine marketing agency, has added a free external link checker to its growing number of SEO tools available on its website at www.vertical-leap.co.uk

The external link checker has been added primarily as a result of recent hacking incidents uncovered by the agency's team of Campaign Delivery Managers.

Most recently a selection of links covertly hidden in the source code 'behind the scenes' was discovered on a new client's website that linked to a network of other compromised pages, and indirectly to a ring-tone site.

On another occasion, a commercial Internet Service Provider's entire server had been hacked resulting in all the websites hosted there being linked to spam pages, without their owners' knowledge.

Concerned website owners simply enter their site's name into the tool at http://www.vertical-leap.co.uk/seo-tools/external-links.asp and a free report is emailed back listing all the web pages that sites links to, including those you might not know about.

Although evidence of hacking is the most extreme result the tool can discover, Matt Hopkins, Vertical Leap's Managing Director, comments that monitoring outbound links from a client's website is an essential part of ongoing and effective search engine optimisation.

"You can't control who links to your website, but you should be in control of the websites you are linking out to. If your website links to others that are known to spam the search engines or those in "bad neighbourhoods", then this can have an adverse effect on your rankings and of course it is likely that you wouldnnnnÃ?t know anything about it."

Although it is relatively straightforward to monitor outbound links from smaller, static sites, many larger sites may involve third party developers and link builders who add links and might be totally oblivious to the potential harm they are doing to that site's search engine rankings.

Vertical Leap's external link checker simulates a search engine spider and 'crawls' a website to deliver a report. The service is free and there is no obligation. All information submitted is treated in the strictest confidence and is not used for any other purpose.