Hackers are the lastest threat to SEO’s reputation
Having had a website hacked in the last few weeks and knowing a few other people who had sites hacked this issue has been playing on my mind.
Countless blogs and personal sites are being edited my malicious hackers every day to include hidden links to unscrupulous websites. The aim of adding these hidden links is that the sites they link to will end up ranking highly on the search engines and sometimes it works very well.
The consequences are that often the hacked site gets a penalty or malware warning on Google and sometimes the owner doesn’t ever figure it out.
My worry is that the people doing the hacking are often classed as SEO’s because they are engaged in the practice of moving their websites up the search engines rankings. To me this tactic is nothing to do with SEO in the form that most people practice the strategy but as hacking becomes more widespread the issue is only going to get worse.
I guess most people are just to lazy to keep up with loads of security updates when using systems like Wordpress and Joomla. When modification are installed this treshold is even bigger.
Pointing out this issue in relation to SEO would make webmasters more self conscious and actually update their opensource software on their server.
Comment by Joël — February 22, 2008 @ 9:21 pm
Agreed, It is a little scary considering the reputation SEO has anyway.
Comment by semarketin — February 24, 2008 @ 7:09 pm
that was very alarming.,
Comment by crexatalyst — February 25, 2008 @ 7:49 pm
This is terrible. I know that Lyndoman from Cornwallseo.com had his site hacked about a week ago, and his site is still banned from google. His traffic has been affected really badly, so i think this is an issue all webmasters need to be aware of.
Comment by Andy MacDonald - Marketing & SEO Blog — March 1, 2008 @ 6:39 pm