Although Google's indexing methodology is now much more sophisticated than merely tracking link referrals, creating inbound links to a site remains a popular tactic -- and one that's increasingly exploited by unscrupulous site promoters who use hacking techniques potentially add invisible links to their sites onto other legitimate pages. Not only does that give bogus operators higher rankings more traffic, it can also affect your own site's visibility, since Google and other spiders often rank sites lower if they appear to be designed to game search rankings.
Blogger Patrick Altoft suggests a neat trick to track possible intrusions of this kind on your own site: using Google Alerts to track the addition of spurious terms to your site. This isn't a perfect approach, and you'll need to deal with any security vulnerabilities that make such code injection possible in the first place, but it's a neat way to detect obvious attacks.
How to use Google Alerts to find out if your site gets hacked [BlogStorm]

 

Tags: au | fix | google alerts | security | seo