If you follow this site (and you should!) you’ll notice that over the last month we’ve changed looks and haven’t posted new reviews and you may wonder why. Here’s the deal: we were hacked. We didn’t even know you could hack a website like ours (I mean we aren’t a bank or government or whatever). It turns out you can.

Our site was injected with something called Blackhat SEO some time in February to March. That means that someone hid code on our site that would give false links to all kinds of “enhancement” selling sites. Readers never saw it. We never saw it. But search engines did and boosted those links’ hits to raise their results. Nothing malicious and nothing dangerous for our readers or our content. But troubling.

So we reset the site with a backup, changed servers and did a bunch of stuff to harden the site. And it worked. We’ve now had this site running for several weeks (and a test site before this base don the backup for a month) and no more SEO.

The site is fully functional. All our old reviews (over 700!) from your favorite reviewers like Deanna Love Gottreu and the Golden Reviewer are back up. Some pictures aren’t working and we will continue to work on getting those back. In the mean time enjoy the reviews. We apologize for the lapse. And harden your sites!

[email protected], Managing Editor