claus - 4:07 am on Dec 16, 2008 (gmt 0)

I'm happy to see this thread. Good stuff, tedster. People should really learn to look in their own back yard sometimes.

I've gotten a lot of stickies and mails throughout the past few years claiming this or that "incident" with some "offending site" or with Google; and a very large percentage of the observed ranking problems could be traced back to bad configuration of the site in question.

I'm not using the word "hacking" as my first choice though, as a lot of these symptoms can be caused by ignorant or clumsy webmasters without any interference from third parties at all. Or, even webmasters trying to "cheat a little" and blame somebody else. No names, no examples.