site hacked, hidden links - let AdSense know? - Google AdSense - Display Ads forum at WebmasterWorld

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site hacked, hidden links - let AdSense know?

What would you do?

dibbern2

8:07 pm on Aug 27, 2008 (gmt 0)

One of my most important sites was hacked about 3 weeks ago and the index page was exploited to include about 100 hidden links to porn in an invisable div.

I am learning about the server exploits that make such a hack possible from another thread here at Webmasterworld, but I have a few questions for the AS community here.

Do you think this could put an AdSense account in jeopardy? I'm speaking from the point that I believe porn is against the AS TOS, and also, that 100 hidden links (be they porn or whatever) certainly qualifies a site as link spam, which could make my site undesirable to AS's business practices.

Would you contact AS? The only reason I hesitate to do that immediatly is the occasional reports here about waking the sleeping dog and opening up other troubles. This is probably a paranoid attitude on my part; I believe my sites would pass close scrutiny easily, and I am pretty much a white hat webmaster.

martinibuster

4:28 am on Aug 28, 2008 (gmt 0)

The issue is resolved. Issues are resolved all the time like in the form of forum spam. Google doesn't need to hear about it. You took down the links, you are now in compliance. I doubt they'll contact you about something that's been resolved and is no longer an issue. What would they say?

In the highly unlikely case they decide to unplug you, then you have a problem to discuss. Until then there is no problem to discuss.

biscuit

5:59 pm on Aug 29, 2008 (gmt 0)

We had something similar, but lost control of the entire site. It took a while to get things back under control, so we let G. know that we were not currently in control of the URL and were not answerable for the content.

G came back and said as long as those now in control of our site were not using our publisher ID (they weren't) it was not an issue for them. Eventually we got the site back, and adwords simply picked up where it left off.