Several months ago we released an all new feature called “Outbound Link Checking.”
You can read that post here: http://www.mastersitemanager.com/882/seo-monitor-outbound-link-tracking/
Now when we released this feature we strongly suggested how important this little number could be. Not know how many outbound links your site has is a disaster waiting to happen. And why paying attention to the Outbound Link Tracking feature of our SEO monitoring software is so important.
In a nutshell – If you see the number of outbound links on your site jump dramatically, (upwards of 200-300 over night) check the source code of your site ASAP!
It’s likely that a hacker has managed to get in and plant links to his porno / casino / sex drugs web sites.
What happens in cases like this is that at first Google will depress your rankings because your site is linking to “Bad Neighborhoods”.
Then after a period of time (Google won’t say how much – but we are thinking 60-90 days based on what we’ve seen) if you don’t correct the issue, Google will just de-index your site altogether. Ouch!
Here’s an example how bad the problem is with blogs like Word Press.
If this happens to you, it is correctable but it’s a huge pain in the you know what as you’ll have to go in an modify the WP database table. Restoring the blog/site from a backup won’t fix the problem in most cases.
But we found a very good explanation on how to clean your blog “IF” you’ve been hacked. Here’s another great WP hack prevention resource.
Now why would I say your account has been hacked? Good question…. The answer will surprise you.
We recently did a maintenance survey of the sites using MasterSiteManager.com for their SEO rank tracking and monitoring. And what we found was shocking even to us!
Almost 1 in 50 client sites that we monitor on MasterSiteManager shows that they have over 200 outbound links on them (in other words – they got hacked). 1 in 50! Wow!
But that’s also a pretty good indication of how wide spread and prevalent the issue is on blogs all over.
So I urge you to login in to your MasterSiteManager account right now and check the outbound links for each of your sites. After all, you can’t fix a problem you don’t know you have.
