I had an agreement to display a banner for a webmaster friend of mine, who also participates in my forum. This had been the case for a year or so.
That is until I made some forum posts that he passionately disagreed with. As far as I am concerned, I am entitled to my opinions and he should be man enough to rebuttal with his own opinions and leave it at that. However, I just noticed that his banner on my site (served from his own server) had been replaced with a blank image, perfectly matched to the background colour, hence effectively it is a hidden link, therefore violation of Google guidelines... and I suspect he did this out of malice and has reported it to Google, or similar.

Naturally, I pulled the code without delay but I'm now deeply concerned that everything is the cache is evidence of this and it could cause me a serious problem soon.

Can this hurt my website, which has just recently started getting good traffic after years of effort?

[edited by: Asia_Expat at 11:19 am (utc) on Sep. 12, 2007]