Being rather new to the Blogosphere, I was amazed at the flood of comments presented for my approval on the most insignificant postings. Before I started my blog, I thought that, of the millions of blogs out there, it would just disappear into cyberspace, only to be seen by a few faithful friends, and then only when prompted. But, there they were, in my inbox, “Comment waiting approval…”
But wait, the comments are too generic–“This is a great blog”–or, just plain inappropriate–“Short and to the point,” when mine tend to be wordy and drift off-topic. And, they each come with a URL of the poster that leads back to a strange and disjointed blog. Hmm, I see a pattern here. A bit more research shows that these blogs seem to be a list of keywords or keyword-rich cut and paste from dozens of other blogs and websites.
I’ve been studying Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques lately, for a project I’m working on, and these chaotic blogs seem to be exactly what the SEO experts say not to do if you want to get search ratings. They are attempts by the owners to get high search engine rankings for the keywords, so as to draw traffic to one or more links on the page. I suspect these trash blogs might be the handiwork of the many fly-by-night SPAM factories that promise to get you good search ratings. My advice is, don’t approve comments of this type–they can only damage your own search ratings. One comment URL I reviewed led back to a website that, on the surface, appeared to be a directory for academic papers on specific topics. But, scrolling further down the page revealed a rather large pornography index. Delete! Linking this sort of thing could not only destroy your ratings, but get your website blocked by association.
My advice is, if a comment to your blog appears to be flattering, but generic, just trash it. And never, never respond to SPAM offers for SEO for your website. If you want to get better ratings, be careful of who you link to.
I wouldn’t say I completely agree regarding certain thoughts, but you certainly have an interesting writing style. Anyway, I appreciate the quality you bring to the blogosphere and that this isn’t just another abandoned, made-for-adsense site! Take care…
Tricky, tricky. OK, I concede some comments have relevance, even if they do shamelessly promote heavily-spammed products or are SEO-trash. I am fascinated by the whole allegory of the Internet as a big parking lot full of windshield flyers, which it currently is, and would like to pursue this discussion further, but in some way that does not actually fulfill the aims of the posters who just want to drive up their search links.
After a bit of research, I have come to a compromise by adding the “no-follow” tag to certain threads. So, you can click on the poster’s link (please don’t), but the robots won’t add it to the link count for the ad site it points to.
Including _this_ comment does not in any way endorse the use of appetite suppressants, natural herbal or otherwise. Judy and I used a popular behavior-control method to lose a total of 190 pounds between us, the story of which is journaled on our family web site, pre-blog days, and we reject any get-thin-quick schemes.
Well, something in this post has triggered a flood of blogspam: 12 [rejected] comment posts in the last 24 hours, all from the same IP address, all devoid of any content except lists of SPAM keywords for phony on-line pharma and insurance sales sites and their associated URLs. The culprit is hiding behind altushost.com, which is in Belize. I’ve been used to seeing this kind of fecal-matter storm in my spam-trap on our email servers for a long time now, but hadn’t been aware of how deeply the blogosphere has been infested with this waste of good bandwidth and storage space. One more dirty bit bin to empty on a daily basis… When there weren’t so many of these cockroaches on the ‘Net, I used to put effort into making trouble for them by getting them booted off of legitimate service providers. There are still Real-Time Black Lists to block traffic from flagrantly abusive servers, but sometimes the owners of the addresses aren’t themselves evil, just unfortunate enough to have rented space to the wrong folks or sloppy about security. Still, SPAM in all its forms is growing rapidly enough to consume the entire Internet–because, at some level, it pays. P.T. Barnum said there is a sucker born every minute; on the Internet, it’s something like every 2 seconds… Meanwhile, the windshield-flyer storm has completely covered the windows and is waist-deep in the parking lot. The Internet is global, and the laws against littering are local. Big problem.
New guy here, I beed to make known to you of the Malware crap that is affluent far the net. This force be a bit off matter but if things go well it whim escape folks get that crapy spyware off their PC.
Browser hijacking can make a balls-up of your large day and check out your grey matter filled with malevolent thoughts toward the perpetrators. But there are other, faster methods to subsist with it nearby tracking down and slaughtering notable ( uniform if they in officiality DO desperately claim to it ) there are sundry extensive programs you can use to fix hijacks, some superiority than others. Here we may contend deliberate over the superiority ones.
For what it is merit, the old saying that an oz Of pruniformtion is good a com of mend indubitably applies here and the strong of getting a browser hijack is explicitly cognate to your own bosom browsing habits. So it stands to on account of that if you’re looking for something in one of those categories you are far more favourite to run across a browser hijack than if you acknowledge to the untangle and narrow. But disinterested the rout of us can on bring on digress from the beaten haul and run into difficults. If you obtain been hijacked you pass on be to put up it from circumstance again and unfortunately ample, staying away from ‘those lenient of sites’ is the maximum effort way to do this.
And, as run-of-the-mill, you at the end of the day lack to run anti-virus and anti-malwarebytes programs in the presence of an up in the air comes up. But fair here and now you are faced with the maladprincipleded of ‘what to do to fix it?’
If your browser has been hijacked and you don’t already from vamp programs established you could be up against the wall. myriad hijackers actively stymie you from visiting sites where you can download the pickle, which implies you pass on obtain to get on another method, download the programs and put them to the infected system from a removable drive. And there’s also one named Hijack This. Each of these are wonderful programs and can take some, but possibly not all browser hijacks. ( a full of energy vow of warning: numberless malevolent programs set as being anti-virus/anti-spyware programs. )
While leader this I couldn’t facilitate but reckon of Robert Deniro and how a oddball he power action would agreement with a browser hijack. It’s a modesty we can’t virtuous gun the people who do it down while saying, ‘Hijack this!!’ But at least there are some unaffected-soul, workable options, such as those listed above.
More info there Internet insurance you can learn on malware bytes
Thanks, Newbie
“Newbie” (Inapteva, above) is right–the comment is a bit off-topic, but pertinent to the whole deceptive-practices issue on the Internet today. The one thing that bothers me about this post is that the links (which have been removed as a precaution) pointed to a different site than the malwarebytes site referenced. This is always a big red flag for me when looking at web sites and emails, and usually leads to the very thing that the poster warns against: downloading malware instead of the cure.
One other point as to why this post is off-topic: This forum is primarily for and about Unix (and the lifestyles of Unix folk). The kind of browser-hijacking attacks described in the comment just don’t happen to Unix and Unix-like systems.
First, most malware is targeted specifically at Windows, modifying The Registry, which any user can do in Windows, if they have administrative rights. Most home users do have administrative rights, otherwise they wouldn’t get much work done at all, including downloading and executing files that install themselves on the system, which is how both malware and useful programs get onto Windows systems.
Secondly, in Unix, if configured correctly, only the superuser can modify critical files and configurations, which are structured very differently from Windows internal controls.
Thirdly, Unix users should never run desktop applications logged in as the superuser, as an added precaution, so that files they download cannot overwrite system files. Even if the Unix user does have administrative rights, any process that requires superuser access will explicitly require the user to authenticate and authorize the process.
I didn’t make any other editorial changes to this post. The comment came from a computer located in China, which would account for the interesting choice of idiom in the rather colorful discourse. Those of us for whom English is a first (or only) language often do not appreciate how idiomatic our mother tongue is, or how difficult it is to translate idioms in other cultures to American cultural equivalents.