Yesterday I posted about the Catalyst Code website and how I was surprised to see them using Black Hat SEO tactics. I was really surprised because it appeared to be the official blog for the book and authors. They were listed at contributors. I couldn’t believe that such a high profile group would resort this. So, because I found the book quite valuable and was having a hard time swallowing this, I thought I would go straight to the source and ask them why they were using such tactics. It turns out they were shocked as well. Here’s the response that I received from coauthor Richard Schmalensee:
“Thanks very much for your note – which surprised us all. Here’s what we’ve heard from our web people so far:
‘Someone obviously spammed our site … actually went in and embedded that code in our site. We are working on it, but a note back to thank him for bringing to our attention the fact that we were spammed was very helpful – and we are taking steps now to address that, e.g. eliminate it and track back to see if we can determine who might have done it.
I just spoke with Todd at Sabre, he is speaking with his developers now to see how someone could have embedded code onto the site. Todd told me to call One and One, our hosting company to figure out how that may have occurred.’
Thanks again for letting us know we’d been spammed. It will be fixed.
Best,
Dick Schmalensee”
So it looks they were the victims of some hacker that was using their site to do what is called link spamming or spam indexing. Although, this is not something fun if it happens to you. I am glad to hear that they were hacked and it wasn’t something that they consciously did or approved.
Ah, the world is good again. 😉
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