Everybody loves a secret, or so it is said. So it is no surprise that old marketing gimmick of using “secret” somewhere in the pitch showed up in some referral spam in Blogger stats. That means another chance to fire up a virtual machine and do some investigating. Don’t try this at home, kids.
http: // www . 7secretsearch . com / is the latest spam to hit and it promises all sorts of secrets to upping your web traffic. The big come on is a form where you can enter your website URL and find out how much it’s worth. Featuring a slick presentation it is an enticing trap, no doubt.
The wrong sized ads showing up in the right sidebar are another giveaway that this isn’t a really a professionally setup website. Poor placement of the title graphic resulted in a banner text ad overlapping it. But the best has to be more Google +1’s than Facebook likes. That is highly implausible, don’t you think?
There was no way I’d put my own website in there, so I decided to click on the Amazon entry. An impressive amount of data comes up including that the site has no threats reported and is “SAFE to browse.” Looks kind of legit, until you notice they are using Bing stats only. Yeah, like Amazon isn’t indexed by Google.
That last oversized ad raised a lot of red flags so I clicked on it.
Anytime something pops on a web page that says you need your system scanned, it is time to get out of there immediately. Systweak has been know to present a download of one program that turns out to be another which grants remote access to your PC. They are bad guys who will take your money and mess your computer up.
What I find amusing is that they had this ad show up when I was using Ubuntu to browse the site. Windows errors on a Linux machine is not logical.
So there are layers of shadiness to what’s showing up at 7secretsearch. Avoid at all costs.
15 comments:
Just saw a bunch of hits from this website and your blog post came up first in a google search. I figured that's exactly what it was so thanks for doing the research.
You are very welcome!
Patrick, have found cogent explanations and excellent research every time I google these weird visitors to my blog. Found you about a month ago and am most appreciative. Thanks. it's a good service you do here.
Geo - Glad to be of service.
Hello, Patrick.
I was wondering what on earth that site was about. I closed it immediately upon arrival as it looked shady and reminiscent of the Geocities era (another huge red flag). Thanks for the heads up here that reinforced my doubts about that site! =)
mich - So that was what it reminded me of! You're right, it does look like an old GeoCities page. Now I feel old, at least in Web years.
I just got that spam referral right after posting. How do they do this so quickly?
Kevin - It's all automated.
Humans set up the material, chuck it into prefab software, wind it up and let it go. Sometimes they don't even bother to end the programs spreading the links even after the links are dead.
So it could be the software scans for activity on a blog and fires off a fake referral as soon as it registers any. Or it could be just random timing based on preset sending intervals.
thanks for the great tip
Hi Patrick,
Your blog is the first useful information I could find about this type of spam. Thanks for a great job. Now, how do I get rid of it? I have 100+ hits from Vampirestat today and I have reported it everyday for two weeks to Google. They remove a porn pop-up but can't seem to do anything with secretsearch and vampirestat.
Keep up the good work!
Catherine
3160catherine - Unfortunately you can't do anything to get it removed. Reporting it to Google is all that can be done within the system and these things have been around for years.
The alternative is to create an account with a better tracker such as StatCounter or Google Analytics. Both have free versions and do a better job at filtering out false hits though they aren't perfect.
Hi Patrick, your reply to Catherine - would that mean setting up a new blog?
Andrea - Since I'm not sure which part of my reply you were addressing, I'll answer both possibilities, so please forgive me for over replying!
Making a new blog would not change anything since the bot software used scans for new blogs and hits them almost as soon as they are put up. Best to ignore them.
You can install StatCounter and Google Analytics in existing blogs, that's what I did.
www.statcounter.com is where you register for the free version of the service and if you look at that home page under "Guided Installation" you'll see Blogger at the top of the list.
Google Analytics can be found at www.google.com/analytics or more specifically the how to part at:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1086338?hl=en&ref_topic=1726910
An easier method is to set up the Analytics account and then go to "settings-other" and scroll to the bottom of that page. There's now a place where you can put your Analytics ID to automatically link it to your blog.
Hope I managed to answer the question!
Hey Patrick, thanks for spreading the word on this. I'm a technically inclined type of guy, so I thought it was weird when I started getting hits from these sites the second I opened my blog.
Here's some more information about these types of sites, what they do and how they work.
http://calvinscode.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/blog-writers-beware-spam-sites-sending.html
Hopefully Google will do something about this.
- Calvin
Calvin - Great to see you and others post warnings about them. The more people get the word out the less successful the spammers will be.
It'd be nice if Google did something about filtering the sites out, but Blogspot seems to be the redheaded stepchild of their online empire.
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