This is slightly unfortunate for a firm of solicitors - Dixon Coles & Gill. If you run a Google or Yahoo search this is the result that gets displayed:
I don't somehow think this is going to attract them many new clients. I did ring them last week and told them about it, but the person who is in charge of their website was away for the day. Interestingly, the person I spoke to said 'Yes, we've seen this before' and didn't express any great surprise! Given that no-one rang me back to say 'thanks for pointing this out' I thought that I'd share it with a wider audience and use it as an example as to why it's always important to check the results you get in search engines and why you need to have, and to keep, total control over your own website.
Wow, did you look at the source code on that site? They have a TON of hidden links on the page, all for viagra crap around the internet. I would estimate 1,000 links on their home page alone.
That pretty well explains the text that Google is showing. I also found it funny that the name of the firm is spelled wrong in the SERP, because it's spelled wrong in their page title. It's "Coles", not "Cole", right?
Posted by: Mickey | February 26, 2008 at 12:24 AM
If you do make contact, first thing I might try would be to exclude the ODP & Yahoo directory descriptions. There's a meta robots tag for each now.
Posted by: Steve Matthews | February 26, 2008 at 01:23 AM
Thanks, Phil, for a great example of a site that has been hacked in order to redirect traffic to a hoax viagra online store. One of the redirects in the hack was also hacked. But it has since been cleaned up.
Posted by: Genie Tyburski | February 26, 2008 at 11:25 AM
Thanks, Phil, for a great example of a site that has been hacked in order to redirect traffic to a hoax online store. One of the redirects in the hack was also hacked. But it has since been cleaned up.
Posted by: Genie Tyburski | February 26, 2008 at 11:26 AM