Believe it or not this site was hacked. And, the strange part about it is that if you were to look at it in its hacked state it would have looked completely normal, from the outside no changes were visible. However, after looking at the HTML’s source code you would have seen close to a thousand links hidden from the public’s view using CSS.
I know some of you are thinking, why?? Why would anyone want to hack a site just to post hidden links? Links you can’t see, don’t get clicked, right? Yes that’s right, but these links aren’t supposed to be clicked, these links were there for the sole intent of being picked up by Search Engines like Google.
Why would anyone go to such an extent to post a link for Google to find? SEO, Search Engine Optimization is the method of changing a series of factors to get your web site ranked higher in search engines. One of the most important aspects of SEO are links pointing to your web site. Therefore it is easy to understand why some black hat SEOs will hack a blog to post more links that will benefit them.
How can we protect our sites and blogs from this type of attack? Well, if you have a WordPress blog you need to make your way over to a post that thet amazing Donna Fontenot wrote at SEO Scoop. Thanks to Donna for this awsome post and her constant reminder to keep our WordPress up to date!
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