Ever seen a black hat SEO hack this sneaky?

[AdamThompson]

A friend pointed out to me that a University site had been hacked and used to gain top Google rankings. But it was cloaked so that most users wouldn't notice the hack. Only Googlebot and visitors from Google SERPs for the spam keywords would see a hacked version.

See http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/122-how-hackers-gained-an-easy-1-google-ranking-using-a-university-website.whtml (my blog) for screenshot and specifics.

I've dealt with hacks before, but nothing this evil and sneaky. Ever seen anything like this? This is not our client, but was just curious if others had seen a hack like this before.

[SteveOllington]

I have seen stuff like that in the SERP's but the only experience I have of getting hacked is a bit different. I worked in-house for a large travel corporation a couple of years ago and whilst the company's site was fine, their very popular blog wasn't. I just started there and looked at the source code of the blog (for some reason nobody was ever checking that) and found that there were hundreds of links to porn and poker sites hidden by CSS. It was all down to the fact that the blog was on Wordpress and hadn't been updated for a while.

Other than that, we've had sites we host hacked a few times, from hidden links to malware on the sites which of course produced warnings in the browsers. Again, all down to not keeping up with security patches and other updates. I learnt some lessons there.