There is a meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX,NOFOLLOW" at page http://www.w3.org/Consortium/sup, so it's not a Google disable link power.

Cherry, that seems to be new – it wasn't in there when we discussed the issue.
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-07-07.html

I was watching the news last night and it appears that the UN's primary web agency is under investigation. The UN has spent millions of dollars on the web – primarily with a single vendor. The sums of money and actual return on that investment are under scrutiny.

You know... normal U.N. stuff!

It's not just the UNESCO site – check the other links which that domain has. And check the other pages on the domains where the links are found. The UNESCO site – at least the forum and some of the other sections – have a lot of hidden links to all sorts of off-topic domains. The funny part is that the forum is also filled with links, but they're all visible.... all sorts of pseudo-spammy posts with links to off-topic domains :-).

Again, if you track the other links to 44w.de (use MSN or Yahoo, Google won't show them correctly) you'll quickly find lots of other sites which have similar hidden links. Since the hidden links are not all to 44w.de, you almost have to assume that 44w.de did not place them there itself, but perhaps bought them either directly from a hacker/cracker or from an SEO who worked together with a hacker/cracker.

This link has been online for at least a year now, it's hard to say when it was added and how much "value" has been passed through it. But I think it's safe to say that it is pushing that domain – who else in their right mind would link to an affiliate site like 44w.de to give it that PR?

I would bet that this is just the tip of the iceberg with regards to hackers placing links and this is only going to get much, much worse in the future. The harder it is to get high-value links, the more it's worth it to "steal" them. A site like UNESCO will link out to many sites anyway, small changes in pages like this might easily fly under the radar of most automatic link-detection algorithms.

The other problem is the same as mentioned with regards to the Talk-Origins penalty: how do you contact a webmaster who can take an issue like this seriously and actually respond to it? The larger the site, the less likely you'll ever find someone who understands the issue or has the power to escalate it to someone who can get it fixed. (And getting it fixed is not just fixing the content, it's also finding and plugging the original hole.)

How many of us would spot a link like that on their own website?

Yes, it's an obvious "crack" of the site.

Did anyone try to mail the webmaster?

>Did anyone try to mail the webmaster?
Several times over the last year .... :-(

Is it a case of "nobody's responsible, let's ignore it" or "I don't see it" or even a "those spammers always try to sell their seo stuff" ? I bet they wouldn't even notice if they got dumped from Google's index....