Well, we didn’t technically catch a cold. Our site was infected by the Pharma hack for WordPress.

This insidious and annoying code infects your website so that you can’t see it. You don’t see this collection of sp am words when you login with a browser, but unfortunately the search engines suck it all up. Google, Bing and other bots see this link-rich collection of words that you don’t want to share from your site, but you don’t see it at all. Annoying.

Thanks to the fine folks at Sucuri for documenting this hack and the fix, and to Larry Aronson for helping me to fix it all up. I recommend Larry constantly, and for good reason.

If you manage websites, run a scan from Sucuri’s home page and ensure that your own site hasn’t caught cold. You’ll be glad you did.