hidden link to web designers website on my website

[dailypress]

I just discovered that my webdesigner added a small square image (exactly the same color as the background) on the footer and linked to his own website.

So now im wondering if he did the same to all my other websites or not!
I found out by changing the background of my website when I noticed a small block on the footer.

whats the easiest way to find out the outward links from my website?

I highly doubt he has done this before, but want to double check!

I told him day 1 that he should remove the links Designed by on the footer and he agreed! I contacted him again after a year to develop a new site and apparently he hadnt forgot the terms but this time decided to add a backward link.

so in short, how do I easily double check all my sites. is there a software for that?

[phranque]

the Web Developer add-on for firefox will allow you to turn off background images and styles.
you can also view the links on each page, either as a list or as an overlay on the page.
there are similar features in safari and opera out of the box.

a link checker such as xenu link sleuth will show you all the links on your site or a list of sites.

[Auciker]

First off, search engines consider that to be a deceptive practice, so he's almost certainly gaining nothing from that link.

Second, how are you updating your site? Do you use a CMS like Wordpress or Joomla? Do you use a desktop program like Dreamweaver or Frontpage?

[lammert]

If your site is on Linux, you could give a command like the following to search for all occurrences of references to that domain in your source files:

grep example.com *.php *.html

where example.com is the domain name of your designer and *.php and *.html are wildcard names for your source files. If your source files have other names you should of course change the wildcards.

[kaled]

Try this in Google

site:yourdomain.com otherdomain

Assuming the image uses alt-text this should probably work.

You could also check for inbound links to the other domain and see if any are from your domains. I think this is possible with Yahoo and Google webmaster tools but I've not tried it for a while.

Kaled.

[Lexur]

I vote for the Xenu option.

It's small, free and may show broken links and, who knows, any kind of artifacts in your website.

[MrHard]

Looks like a simple attempt to get a link in at your expense. Risking your rankings for just one link.

Ask the reason for the link. Just removing it is not enough we want a reason? Please post here.

Can't let moles operate, need to be above board.

Post the entire link here including anything appended to the end, just leave out the domain section.

[edited by: MrHard at 2:04 am (utc) on Mar 7, 2010]

[youfoundjake]

I second Xenu.
Sounds like a breach of trust, can you trust him again?