A Dirty Spam Trick

By Jonathan Bailey • Jan 7th, 2008 • Category: Articles, Prevention

Earlier today, I ran across a post on Digg that referenced a blog readability test.

The idea behind the test is simple. You type in the URL of your blog or site and it tells you the approximate reading level required to understand it. It got me curious about the readibility of this site so I decided to run PT through the program.

However, after completing the test, I discovered that it has a slightly more sinister side to it. In short, if one decides to embed the code into their site, they might discover an unexpected surprise.

Spam Links

To understand the problem let us compare first how the results are displayed on the original site:

With how it would appear if you embedded it on another site without first editing the provided code:

At the bottom you’ll see the difference, namely the naked link for “Fast Payday Loans”

The problem with this is pretty simple. Nowhere on the original site does the Webmaster disclose that this link is added and, unless you closely examine the provided HTML code, you will never even notice that it is there.

Many who use the tool, no doubt, have been tricked into adding that link to their site.

This can not only hurt their reputation among their visitors by associating the site with less-than-reputable sites, but also hurt your search engine ranking by connecting you with spammy sites and questionable content.

Clearly, this is one test, or at least one embed, to avoid.

Conclusions

Even though this isn’t a content theft matter, I know many of the readers of this site are very interested in spam issues apart from scraping and spam blogging.

I wanted to take a moment to warn everyone about this rather “sneaky” way of injecting links into a site and encourage everyone who does post these kinds of tests to be extra careful of the code you copy.

Your best bet, most likely, is to look through the code carefully for anything suspicious (with this code the reference to “Payday Loans” tripped my radar) and always preview the code offline before publishing it live.

Personally, I just plan to avoid posting these results to my site, even if occasionally one is interesting enough to take.

Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
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10 Responses »

  1. According to Recording Studio on January 8th, 2008 at 9:05 am:

    I have now had the time to read the post. Wow! What cheek! This is a lesson well worth learning to prevent being taken to the cleaners. Thank you.

  2. According to JB on January 8th, 2008 at 1:56 pm:
    RS: Very welcome for the info. This really caught me by surprise and I’m very glad I didn’t plan to actually embed the code. It is just a sleazy thing to do.

    Hopefully others will learn from this and not fall into the trap…

  3. According to Sue on January 8th, 2008 at 3:03 pm:

    Wow, what a shocker. I’ve used it a couple of times, but never (fortunately) installed their little “brag/ad” box on my blog. Thanks for the heads up, Jonathan.

  4. According to Sue on January 8th, 2008 at 6:22 pm:

    Actually, it may not have been that one I used. The one that I did use is legit, there is nothing to embed on your site, strictly online. It’s at http://immike.net/charlotte/

  5. According to JB on January 9th, 2008 at 3:30 am:
    Sue: That’s definitely a different site. This one works from your home page and not the RSS feed. Of course, for some reason, I can’t get yours to work, it is hung up with seven people in front of me and is just spinning.

    Rather frustrating I must say but it does look very neat.

  6. According to Sue on January 10th, 2008 at 5:00 pm:

    Yeah, it does that sometimes (hangs up). But when it works, it’s great. I had it stuck at 11 ahead for two days. When I went there to recheck it, and although it said 7 ahead, it was done in seconds. Go figure. (?!?)

  7. According to JB on January 10th, 2008 at 9:49 pm:
    Sue: Still not working for me, still hung up at seven. Something like this is usually because the service isn’t very fault tolerant. I’ll wager it has something to do with incorrectly formatted feeds or something to the like.

    Still, I am curious…

  8. According to Forrest on January 16th, 2008 at 2:57 am:

    I’m curious what my reading level might be … certainly not enough to embed spammy links into my blog, though. I wonder if this gives more exposure to scrapers, hackers who would try to find editable files or weak passwords, or anything else, by entering your URL into the form…? No particular reason to, except that these peoples’ trustworthiness has already been demonstrated.

    Many of these online questionnaires will try to get you to link to their site, or to have you disclose your email address … but this is beyond the pale.

  9. According to Jonathan Bailey on January 16th, 2008 at 1:32 pm:
    Forrest: I doubt there is any major security issue with just giving a site your URL. The reason is you give out your URL every time you post an entry to the pinging services. Also, a URL wouldn’t contain information about the backend of your site. That would have to be scanned for through other means and it would be faster to get that information via other methods than waiting for people to try a silly test.

    I don’t trust these guys as far as I can throw them, but I think their evil nature is more focused on spamming and link building rather than hacking. Hackers have scanning tools to find flaws and don’t need to use a survey or test.

    I wouldn’t worry too much about that, though it is an interesting question.

  10. According to Roundup » Miscellaneous and Useless Information on February 23rd, 2008 at 8:27 pm:

    [...] what they are measuring, and Jonathan Bailey in his blog Plagiarism Today has pointed out a sleazy ad technique they [...]

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