Is your website hiding gambling links? How to check in five minutes

What we found

In September 2026 we traced the links pointing at a domain we had just bought. Twelve of the sites linking to it carried the same block of code. They included a German secondary school, a Berlin theatre, a Swiss ambulance service and a French regional council. None of them had put it there.

The block, shortened:

<div style="display:none !important;position:absolute !important;
  left:-9999px !important;width:1px !important;height:1px !important;
  overflow:hidden !important;opacity:0 !important;visibility:hidden !important;"
  aria-hidden="true">
  <a href="https://…">Teosbet</a><a href="https://…">Teosbet giriş</a>
  <a href="https://…">Kingroyal</a><a href="https://…">Kingroyal giriş</a>
  …about thirty links…
</div>

Every link names a Turkish betting brand, twice: once plain, once with giriş, Turkish for "entry" or "login". People search for exactly those two phrases to find a betting site's current address.

Each rule in that style attribute hides the block a different way, all at once. Nothing shows on screen, and aria-hidden keeps screen readers quiet too. The only reader left is a search engine.

Why anyone does this

Links tell search engines which pages matter. A link from a real school or theatre carries weight a new betting domain cannot earn. So someone breaks into small, trusted sites and plants links in bulk. Google names both halves of this in its spam policies:

• Hidden text and links, including "using CSS to position text off-screen" and "setting the font size or opacity to 0".
• Hacked content: "any content placed on a site without permission, due to vulnerabilities in a site's security".

The site that carries the links pays for them. Google can demote or flag it, while the betting site collects the benefit.

Check your own site

1. Open the page source. In most browsers, press Ctrl+U (Cmd+Option+U on a Mac). This shows the code search engines read, not the page you see.
2. Search it (Ctrl+F) for these: left:-9999px, display:none, giriş, bahis (Turkish for "bet"), casino. A display:none on its own is normal; menus use it. A display:none wrapped round a stack of links to sites you have never heard of is not.
3. Check more than the home page. Injections often sit in a shared footer or template, so they appear on every page at once. That is how a small site ends up "linking" to a stranger hundreds of times.
4. Look yourself up from outside. Some public link indexes list the domains a site links out to. If the list holds names you never linked, the links came from somewhere.

If you find it

1. Remove the block, and find where it lives. In a content management system (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal) it usually sits in a theme file, a plugin, or a database field that feeds the footer.
2. Close the way in. Removing the links without fixing the hole means they return. Update the CMS, its themes and plugins, and delete any you do not use. Change every admin, hosting and FTP password.
3. Tell Google. Google's guide for hacked sites, "Help, I think I've been hacked", walks through cleaning up and asking for a review once the site is clean.
4. Ask your host for help. Hosts see file changes and login records you cannot see.

If the links point at your domain

That is where we started. Someone else's hack can send spam links at a domain you own, sometimes because an earlier owner used it. You cannot remove links from sites you do not control. Google's disavow tool, in Search Console, lets you ask Google to ignore links from listed domains. Use it for links like these, which you never asked for and do not want.