Tom Rogers

My personal and technology blog
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An Evil WordPress Plugin

Posted on 17/08/11

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Anyone who’s looked at any of the articles on this site knows that, as far as the web goes I’m something of a neat-freak. You can imagine then my feeling of horror upon making the discovery that the WordPress plugin that I was using to power the social media links (that were beside each post) had been injecting invisible spam links into all the pages that it was being used on. Worst still is the fact that this evil script hides the links from display so that site owners may never find out they are there.

Unwanted HTML Ads Markup Generated By WP Plugin

Having spam links on your site can cause you big problems beyond just bad semantics. Even though you can’t see them, Google can. My point being that, if a search engine crawler comes to a page and finds any content not related in some way to the main subject, the search rankings for all pages on that domain can suffer.

Needless to say, I’ve turned off and uninstalled the offending script but also urge you to check the source code of your pages once in a while to ensure that there isn’t more then you bargained for lurking within.

Your Responses

Chime In and Give Your Thoughts

Comment Posting Guidance

For the benefit of every non-spambot visiting, following a recent site restructuring I have some rules with regard to etiquette for comment posters. As well as making a better experience for all, they help to distinguish real people for automatic evil machine spam. Due to this, any comment that fails to follow any one of them will be considered spam and removed as soon as possible.

With thanks, Tom

  • Coherent English must be used.
  • This form has multiple fields for a reason. Only enter a real name or nickname in the first box i.e. "Boats For Sale" wouldn't make it. Similarly, the "Website" input is a pre-determined place to post one link so there is no need to have them in the body area. This is a common technique used by spammers and marketers and, as such is not allowed.
  • Your comment must be directly related to the post to which it is a response. The idea of a post commenting system is to further the conversation that began in the given article. For instance "great post" is not a comment. My contact form can be used for suggestions or general communications.
  • Responses to other comments must be civilised.
  • No sexual reference or content is allowed.
  • Duplicate comments are a no-no.