Dirty subdomains on popular sites
Just a week ago, I received a tip about a site that had lots of spammy pages. The root site was a business site that at least in the past had seemed solid. But the spammy pages seemed unrelated, and had also been spamvertized.
While we were looking, the pages disappeared from the site and from Google. I never found out if the site had been hacked or if the spammy pages were there on purpose.
And here’s a related story from May 2006. Syndic8 got “tricked” into accepting and promoting spammy subdomains, with the resulting fallout.
Jeff from Syndic8 wrote a blog post about his stupidity.
I thought it was a good tale, and hopefully will make another webmaster think twice about going down that path.