This is very interesting. I'm in my sixth week of not being able to type. While I have been out of the game, some enterprising person has taken it upon themselves to build a bunch of icky links to my sites. These are links from spammy Viagara pages, cigarette vendors and a couple of porn pages that even make me blush.

Do these unwanted "bad neighborhood" links hurt SEO? Yes, it seems. Combined with my inability to add fresh content, it may have been very mildly effective (search engine traffic across my sites is off by 14 percent from the monthly norm).

This sabotage is a little flattering, even though I know that not all of these links are maliciously directed at me; some of these people are hoping for cheap links from webmasters who (usually accidentally) publish their referrer logs. Make sure your referrer logs are not publicly available. Some hosts make stats public by default, as do some CMSs (not my favorite, Drupal). Change your configuration if this is the case.

Whether the SEO saboteur is trying to sabotage my rankings or build their own, it is mainly ineffective. As soon as I start adding content regularly, the upward trajectory will resume. That's my theory, anyway. I'll let you know how it turns out.