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Wednesday, January 09, 2013

A More Sophisticated Referral Spammer

2013 seems to be shaping up to be a spam heavy year and one that has been around hit my blog today. ontimemarketing . biz takes you to a Wordpress blog that at first glance appears to be legitimate. But spend more than a couple of seconds looking at it and you find that the posts are all taken from other sites to give the illusion that it is serious.

Well, it is serious about one thing and that’s generating online traffic to it in hopes you will click on the wall to wall ads and deals posted there. That is how the owner of the site makes money. I highly doubt Tiger Direct and The Huffington Post are contributing posters to the site given how amateurish the layout is. It is enough to fool spiders from registering it as a fake site, however.

Please do not click to go there. While I detected no malware, I was using Linux to visit the site, so be careful if you do.

Now back to working on real content for this site!

2 comments:

  1. I noticed this while going over my stats on my blog as well I went to the site, I didn't click on anything once there because like you mentioned it just feels fake. Do you know of anyway to block them I would love to.

    ReplyDelete
  2. There might be a way to customize your robots.txt file so their spider bots can't crawl your blog, but they probably use false addresses to insert the hits. In fact, I'm not exactly clear on how they pull this off since they don't appear in Google Analytics or StatCounter.

    By the way, I do not recommend editing your robots.txt. That can mess up your being indexed by Google and lower your search rankings.

    ReplyDelete

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