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you could also contact the hosting company of the site, they might take down the site for you, or  aleast contact the fake site owner

Example 1 is mostly correct, but jazy point is that it would be more like this:

5 Nofollows: 0 juice each but 47.5 thrown away (2.5 naturally lost)

5 Follows: 9.5 juice each (47.5 juice total, 2.5 naturally lost)

Total 47.5, with 47.5 thrown out and 5 naturally  lost

I would think that you would still get benefit from the link on a domain level, but not as good as link to a proper page (as you pointed out).

You could 301 redirect the links to a landing page for the pdf file, but should you? I don't know.

Still it weird that a government site is hotlinking files on your site, I would have thought that would be bad practice from their side.  Still its good news for you.

I agree with the guys above, it less to do with seo (if any) and more about human error.

I used to help with a uk gaming website that had a lot of american visitors, and I notice over the years people (the old time) would link to "sitename".com instead of .co.uk, which was held  by a domain shark, so lost back links.

But I think this is because of an American audience used to everything being .com

Note:  ultimately we bought the .com off the domain shark, I contacted him and originally he wanted $1000s for the domain, I said $300 would be the most I would page for it and said good bye.  2 month later he came back to me and sold it for $300.  So if you have a domain shark with the .com play the long game with them.

It all changed in 2008/09, and link sculpting in this way does not work anymore.  page authority is shared  equally to all links, but for no-follow its not passed, just just thrown out the window (not retained)

you might want to  remove (or break) that url to you competitor stolen article as this forum is crawled too...

I have only used dreamhosts shared hosting, don't know about dedicated.

"would you expect the hosting company to let you know that your site has been hacked or is it down to yourself to know"

Generally no, that you be your responsibility (or if your have a maintenance contact with the web developer).

Again dreamhost has some cool auto safe guards eg one of my clients had malware/virus on his pc and was sending out spam, they auto reset the password when it was picked up.  I also think they have other auto features to inform you about hacking, but its guaranteed service, its just a bonus they do.

I'm not saying you should go with dreamhost, I'm just telling you what they can/have done, (i have only use a few host companies)  but I'm sure there are alot of hosts that do that too (maybe even more).

worked in my moz tool bar in firefox

you can manually check some of the urls, there are loads of tools online that will check it

http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

I came across this site  http://www.sponsoredreviews.com/,  thought its idea was a place were you can offer your product to be reviewed by bloggers, (fairly white hat I would have thought),  I had a quick look and it seemed to me its for for selling back links on blogs, but before I dismissed it completely I just wanted to see if anyone else had any experience with it?

Update:  if this website is no good, are there any genuine places were you can offer you products for review?

What your saying is true, but I have never heard of anyone getting hacked (bar brute forcing password or poor passwords), if they keep upto date with the security fixes.

Some hosts eg dreamhost will auto update installs for you , so you don't have to worry about  updating.

I had a similar issue (not Magento), turns out it was in the sitemap that was submitted to WMTs, did you check there?

check the url in the open site explore too, it might tell you if any urls are linking to it

You would/ should use 301 to fix a 404 error, and direct to the correct content.  404 pages are for when their is no correct content (mistyped url), but ultimately you never want a link to a 404 on your site

its call 404 ERROR for a reason

Yeah standard, "its not our problem" response.

As I said before, if the joomla site shared something like mysql database access then it was most likely not the hosts fault.

I have seen hosts blame opensource cms when actually they were just trying to hide their issues.  Its going to be impossible to know until someone looks properly into it (which hosts will not do, which is fair enough).

1: not sure, but it opens ok.   but if you submit to WMTs it would warn you if there is a problem

2: to my knowledge, its ok to have more than 1 sitemap (seen a few places have 2 with no issue)

http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/page/feature-table.aspx

Google sitemap Yes

so it already generates a sitemap, you just have to find the link

a bit of googling says ther url is www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.axd  (but that was a very old refferance might be different now)

what cms are you using?  most have sitemaps auto generated, or the there is a plugin available.

I'm not an expert (but have some experience) , but if they are truly separated, and the word press sites were up to date but were hacked too, then there is something very wrong.

If each site was on a different domain and were completely separate (separate ftp access, separate mysql database access,  no master/common username and passwords etc)  then that might point to a problem with the hosting side, but to be honest it really hard to know, with our proper investigation.

Since your not technically minded you would be better getting someone with more technical knowledge to review you current setup to see if it was the hosts failing or it was the way you have your sites set up, there is just too many unknowns to get conclusive help from a forum.

Hope that helps

When you say dedicated do you mean a "managed" dedicated server? or are you in charge of server maintenance?

As for joomla I think there are security updates for 1.5 (best check if its still supported, just make sure you have them upto date.  to late now unless you have a backup before the hack then, update straight away and change passwords (there is a  how to recover from a hack guide for this on the joomla site)

If the hacker got into you joomla site and was able to get you database passwords and if that was a master user account that also had access to the wordpress database then I could see how they could have gotten into both.  Of if the word press site is on the same domain  as the hacked joomla site, then again they could get into the wordpress site. Or if you used common usernames or passwords for the different sites.

But the most important with any opensource software is to make sure that your uptodate with security fixes, because as soon as there is a exploit found script kiddies search the web for vulnerable site and have there fun.  I'm know what "cloudlinux with cageFS" is but as your host says it would not have stopped this hack.