"Hacked by Dark SEO Team."
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Or is it? I can't tell.

Interesting. If this was a joke, it was extremely well played out. If not, I feel sorry for Matt. He posted this to his blog just a few hours before:
"My site has been acting a little slow and weird today. I checked my logs, and I’m seeing a lot of GET requests causing strange errors. Most of the requests have escaped Unicode characters, but they don’t appear valid. Sorry that the site is kinda slow; I’m going to be away from the computer until around late Monday, so I don’t have time to check it now, but I’ll try to track it down when I get back."

Posted to Dark SEO blog in 2005: http://www.darkseoteam.com/index.php/2005/10/06/23-open-letter-to-matt-cutts

One man show.
<<blog's been hacked. that's why there was the slowness. i can't fix this now, either. sorry, will try when back on monday>>
http://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/16840941

Is it true or still we are into April Fools jobs ?

Matt Cutts blog hasn't been hacked right ?
google-kai.com/admin/matt-cutt ...

He he he, it's a French team unable to speak French :-P
"nous sommes le proprietaire de toi" = "We're the owners of you"
It should be
"nous sommes ton proprietaire" = "We're your owners"
=)

Well, it's serving a 200 OK HTTP header, so if it's not for real he's risking getting this content indexed... Sadly, I think it's for real.

LOL

April Fool's, Matt! :D

I wonder if he has a backup?

all pages 302-redirected to the homepage... evil...

RandyJ: I posted just this in the comments of the post on the GETs and if they were to theme.php or feed.php

It's just a test to see who all has his email address :-)

> "nous sommes le proprietaire de toi" = "We're the owners of you"

And all your base are belong to us...

Naah, definitely an April Fool's joke from Matt. :-)

If darkseoteam.com has any class, they should change their homepage to one that's “hacked by Matt Cutts”...

   – Michael

Well, it's Matt... I don't think googlebot will be very interested in his blog today ;) Have you noticed the refferings to seo-names? And congrats, phenssen (Phillip Lenssen) was one of the hackers, too :)

RandomFish -> Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz?
Dan "the Man" -> Danny Sullivan?
Romanian brothers -> Ionut?
scbl -> Robert Scoble?

Romanian brotherS => Ionut and Alex Chitu :-P

And just like Daniel, I noticed the congrats to "phenssen" ;-)

"<!-- PR9 since 99. MaDD LoVe to e&o. Peace out. -->"

monkeyboy – > steve balmer
Linusx -> linus torvalds

NYC SEO team -> Google new york?

A user by the name of "MattCutts" dugg stories about the Matt Cutts blog defacement:
http://digg.com/users/MattCutts/news/dugg

[Via Search Engine Land comments...]

And I think its the real Matt Cutts... because his one of my "Friends of Digg" :-P
And because Once he posted about his blog, saying "my" blog: http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Blatantly_Copies_Yahoo#c4228774

> If darkseoteam.com has any class, they should change their homepage to one that's “hacked by Matt Cutts”...

... which they've now indeed done. :-)

Neat:
http://cuttscon.com

[Via Search Engine Land.]

Philipp,

seems that no april fools from you this year...:)

Finally made to the front page.
http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Site_hacked

The title is incorrect. Google doesn't own Matt. (do they?)

The story also reveals Digg's censorship. (read the first couple comments)

All Matt did was make a change to his .htaccess file. Every past link to his blog redirects to his index.html file.

Fitting chance to expose new business for 04-01 fool day.

Didn't anyone click on the link to the DarkSEO site, where it says: Defaced by Matt! I ownz you, Dark seo team!" ??!?!?

Obviously a big gag..... Should be gone by now though....

> Didn't anyone click on the link to the DarkSEO site, where
> it says: Defaced by Matt! I ownz you, Dark seo team!" ??!?!?

Adam, DarkSEO changed their site during the course of the day – their normal blog was showing for a long time in the beginning.

another small detail, the analytics js code in the source of the "hacked page" is the same you can find in his normal pages in the full cache version... so I guess no more mistery :D

If anything strange happens around the day of April 1st, there's a high likelihood it's a joke.

It's back

Matt you are a bitter!!

http://www.joe-whyte.com/2007/04/01/wickedfirecom-hacked-by-nambla-members/

Well done by Matt, and nicely played by the Dark Hat team. I was quite confused for a bit, then highly amused. :D

I said:

>> Well, it's serving a 200 OK HTTP header, so if it's not for
>> real he's risking getting this content indexed... Sadly, I
>> think it's for real.

I think that proves he got me! I guess he was willing to take that risk. If the clues had been more obvious, I would have doubted it straight away. I can't believe I missed the cat references and Google Analytics tracking code though!

<< If anything strange happens around the day of April 1st, there's a high likelihood it's a joke. >>

It's also the perfect day for "real" hacker/pranksters to target sites though, which is why I thought it could easily have been real...

The best part was the build up with the post before it was hacked, though that could have been played out for a day or two. He would have easily got a few hundred people trying to help him get his wordpress installation fixed. Maybe even get Matt Mullenweg involved to add to the reality :)

Now the real question is, after getting his morning coffee did he go over to the big machine and turn back the knobs on his site to March 31st so that the page wouldn't replace the originals? I doubt it, I'd imagine he'll just let it run its natural course.

Matt says on his blog there is a contest, you should play:
http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/04/01/matt-cutts-hacker-shout-out-contest/

Wullon, on a French SEO forum, said:
"
http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=darkseoteam.com
>> BOOM :-P
"