Is there a deliberate effort to hack a large number of blogs for SEO and cash?

April 6, 2008 | By Matt Craven | Filed Under Blog Consulting, Blog Hosting, Blog Marketing and Monetization, Blog News, Blog Software, Features

Tony Hung, former editor here at The Blog Herald, believes that there is. He writes:

Some enterprising hackers have put together a scheme whereby they hack a number of blogs, so that they can create their own network pages and links back to a few select blogs, to pages that are not easily visible. It takes advantage of the organic and real page rank of all of the sites in question, and probably makes some bucks for the hacker involved.

Tony has been able to use the “river of news” feature on memetracking site Tailrank to find a number of blogs that appear to have been hacked in this method.

I have seen something similar occur on my company’s website over at Bryghtpath LLC. We were contacted last month by Google informing us that links to spyware/malware were detected on our company blog - and then we were being delisted until we had notified them that it had been removed. We’d been hacked.

I’m sure this news will evolve throughout the day - I suggest that you ensure that your sites are clean and fully patched with the latest versions of your blogging software of choice.

About the author: Matt Craven is the former editor & publisher of The Blog Herald. Currently, Matt is the co-founder of Bryghtpath LLC, a boutique web 2.0 firm located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He blogs at Telegraphik & The Blog Herald. You can follow him on Twitter.

Comments

One Response to “Is there a deliberate effort to hack a large number of blogs for SEO and cash?”

Dave on April 7th, 2008 8:13 am

I saw a .gov blog that was hacked. Kind of obvious because the blogroll had some gov agencies listed along with Shop Viag. I called the admin person and left him a message and they removed it.

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