Corporate Blogging and Brand Awareness

In the last part of a four part series by Business Week, Matt Cutts continues his discussion on how Google deals with web spam. I would definitely recommend reading the entire article but one section on "hacked" websites caught my eye:

Q: What do you mean by hacked in this context?

A: Spammers hack sites like Al Gore’s and other high-traffic sites and build links out to spam sites, and then they’ll monetize 10 cents per user or whatever. I was literally talking to someone who had written his own blogging software and he got hacked, and he was checking out what had happened and this guy had come and deliberately targeted him and found an exploit in this one guy’s piece of code.

So the scary trend is that as PCs are getting better, people aren’t keeping Web server software such as Wordpress and Drupal, up to date and so they get hacked a lot. So we have to deal with innocent people who have gotten their site hacked and then they’re selling Viagra.

More and more, we're hearing about personal and corporate blogs developed internally or pieced together with plugins being taken over via vulnerabilities with their code.

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