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The Good Doctor Exposes Blog Hacking and Tailrank Spam
Last night, I tweeted that there was a ton of spam in one of my feedreaders coming from Tailrank. All of your typical credit card, viagra enhancements, mortgages, etc. spam. Aussie blogger Duncan Riley replied that this has been going on for a long time.
Tony Hung has completed an analysis of the spam on Tailrank and apparently it goes to hacked Wordpress blogs. Have a look at Tony’s post for information about how the hackers are able to gain control over a blog without the author ever realizing it. Basically the hackers put hidden links into every page on your site using CSS to hide the links.
Bottom line: make sure you keep your Wordpress (or other blog software) current. Here’s this morning’s most popular story on Tailrank in the technology category. The link goes to a blog directory that automatically redirects to a drug site.
This isn’t anything new. I unsubscribed to Tailrank nearly (over?) a year ago because of the same kind of spam reports that you acknowledge today, Allen. It seems that they aren’t prioritizing the service and offering quality results. Instead, it’s a haven for spammers, and I know I’m not alone in unsubscribing for that very reason.
Yeah — the story isn’t really about Tailrank “spam”, so much that *through* Tailrank we can see that a TON of blogs have been hacked.
I was looking for famous ones last night, but through the screen cap, you can clearly see that the ZDnet blogs were hit.
In my opinion, that’s some big news, actually (you should run with it) — so good for you Allen. ;)
t @ dji
Yes and no. This doesn’t bode well for Tailrank because it’s still aggregating tons of blogs that have “poor content” and the algorithm isn’t filtering out text like “tramadol” and “viagra. The quality issue becomes another nail in the coffin for those guys.
You can’t filter spam much by keyword. It doesn’t work anymore. Spammers are just too smart and sneaky.