This is not about spam emails or scam emails with dodgy links in them.

This is about finding that someone has added spam links into your website without permission.

Hackers can insert spam links into your website – to gain a better ranking on search engines. The more inbound links a site receives, the higher the placement of the target web site in search results. Spam links are typically inserted into the database content in plain text, though they can also be deliberately obscured to make finding them more difficult.

Spam links can be inserted in site files or databases, so determining if your site is infected can often be done by simply reading the pages and looking for  inappropriate links.

The most common spam links are:-

• Prescription drugs
• Online gambling
• Essay writing services
• Film & TV downloads
• Fake designer goods
• Weight loss products
• Adult content

Finding and Removing Spam Links

This means painstaking review of the code to find the inserted links. The links may be  inserted as typical hypertext links or they may be disguised by JavaScript for example. Determine which links are not relevant to your site and remove them.

For hackers to have inserted these links into your website means there must be vulnerabilities that they exploited. You need to find these vulnerabilities and fix them or the hackers may return.

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