If you start looking on those type of lists, it is a sign that you are doing something you shouldn’t be – no?

Maybe should be good if Techcrunch advice about hacking websites for SEO.

Many of us know about it, but seems that a lot of people don´t.

I do wish Duncan would update this post to reflect that it was because enjoyperth.net was hacked, but that’s his call.

And I do hope that google can get better at letting sites know why they’ve been unindexed. Lots of confused people in the webmaster forums Like n00bs and GITs (geeks in training ) like me!

It seems 30 days cut off is overdone for one page of hidden text. It would be great if Google had a list of our offenses so that we could straighten out the problem. I put that hidden text in several years ago and forgot.

If you follow the yellow brick road and hit the hacked search pages for bucks.edu, you’ll notice there are no external links. They just lead to other pages within bucks.edu’s hacked search engine.

So, that makes me wonder: maybe this is the result of bucks.edu hiring a rogue (or pathetic) blackhat SEO?

Hack gone wrong?

A straight-out SERPs attack — trying to get bucks.edu de-listed from Google’s index?

I wonder if bucks.edu got hacked as well? All of the spam links are of the form “bucks.edu/search/search.php?id=N” where N is a one or two digit number.

http://www.bucks.edu/ appears to be a perfectly legitimate college site, but those search.php links all go to spammy pages.

Because I don’t even travel to such sites…

hmmf,,, not to be tunnel minded or anything but you know,,,

I doubt that this will be a big loss…

AND FOR HATERS OUT THERE, gawd, shut your trap about google already, google so far is what makes my surfing life soooo much easier,,, and im pretty sure its the same for you..

Simone – really glad to see the source of the problem has been identified, and by the looks of it on its way to being resolved.

With fewer and fewer sites using TLA — they refuse to implement the nofollow attributes — hosting TLA might become more valuable in the future. But, I see it as short-term profit that will last only as long as your pagerank.

Jon

Like outsports.com above, the hidden text triggered a 30 day penalty. We actually emailed outsports.com about their hidden text.

More competition from the other search engines please. Google is a pain.

Also an apology to Duncan, as he would’ve expected me to have checked every possible reason for this in the last week and half (I obviously thought I did, but that’s not good enough).

I was actually signed up to Google Webmaster Tools before this all started, site verified etc. There were no messages, so that actually frustrated me a lot. It just said that the site wasn’t indexed yet, and that this could take some time.
I also posted about it on the Webmaster Google group, but no useful responses.

Anyway, as I said above, at least we now know what the issue was!! I didn’t have a simple password, so now need to learn how this happened and how to prevent these things in the future. I’m still feeling very embarrassed!!

p.s. Duncan probably hasn’t responded because he’s in a time zone where it’s just been night, he’s been asleep.

I feel all warm inside.

They are using all my old tricks: using market power to crush others, using exclusive terms in contracts (e.g. see the MySpace deal), using dominance in one area to gain advantage in a new area and crush nascent competition, etc.

Geez…brings a tear to my eye. Those were the days.

Bill

Selling links shouldn’t be a prohibited practice, even with no ‘nofollow’ tag. If Google wants to crack down on link farms and people buying links in bulk purely for Pagerank, go after the directories, or find the sites that are purchasing 100’s of links with no ‘nofollow’ tags.

Don’t go after the businesses that are merely trying to make a living on the internet.