Have you been pointlessly hacked lately?
So I have been hacked but not in a way that most people would think of. This has affected not only this blog but also my wife’s two blogs KamikazeKumquat.com and CrochetCultist.com. Now you may notice that all of the blogs are still online and seem to have all the content (CrochetCultist.com has lost the template but that is my fault). Plus there isn’t a bunch of crap or visible spam or anything.
So how have we been hacked?
The only way to know is to view the source of the page and you will see a bunch of links near the top of the page. They are all placed into a CSS DIV tag that is set to not be visible. At first glance this may seem pointless as nobody can see the links. Well no person using a modern browser that is. Search Engines on the other hand see every one of the links. Basically what happens is part of how some search engines determine what order sites should be listed in search results is to look at how many sites link to it. Thus someone has hacked these sites to trick the search engines into ranking their sites higher.
Now for the absurdity.
It won’t do them any good.
I can hear people now. ”Wait you just said the links would make search engines list the sites higher”. There are two problems with this though. First, this is related to what Google calls “Page Rank” which other search companies have developed their own versions of. The thing is, all of the search engines use this as only one of many things to determine how high a site should rank. What is far more important is the content of the site and how relavent that content is to the search terms that have been entered. Second, Google and others have stated that links only add noticably to page rank if the page linking is related to the content of the linked to site. Thus indicating that the site being linked is considered an authoritative source. The links all deal with links to information about cars or manufactured homes and other things that have no relation what so ever to the content of any of these blogs.
So basically someone created some code that is capable of infecting all WordPress installations on a server in order to create link-backs that will do them absolutely no good at all. The only thing it accomplishes is to annoy those of us that have to go in and clean things up.
You know, if you are going to hack my site, at least do something that makes sense.