Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by oesmith 4480 days ago
Is this a test of whether anyone actually reads these articles? Every 3rd paragraph has a viagra spam-link inserted in the middle of a sentence.
8 comments

> Is this a test of whether anyone actually reads these articles? Every 3rd paragraph has a viagra spam-link inserted in the middle of a sentence.

Eh.. What? Are you commenting on the wrong article by chance? I don't see any of that. If you're even remotely serious I'd take a good look at your machine/system.

I'm reading on an iPad, so the risk of system infection is negligible.

However, I just switched on my home VPN and the links disappeared. Time to talk to someone in netops, methinks.

I get this too, and only on this site. In Chrome, FF and IE. Maybe the site is infected, and the presence of the spam depends on the visitor's country.

EDIT: The spam is present also when browsing from a Linux VM.

I think you need to run some anti-spy ware software on your computer. I don't see any ads of that sort on the blog page.
Anyone who thinks they can't see them should set their user agent to google's crawler. Then they become immediately apparent. That might also explain why the chrome users see it. I presume that has "google" in the UA somewhere.
Not for me it doesn't. Try running a virus scan on your machine?
But.. ..but he's

> reading on an iPad, so the risk of system infection is negligible.

Now someone should figure this out and post an article about it...
I see those links, too.
It's definitely the site. I have connected on my PC and see the links. Then connect via 3G on my SGS2 - no links. Connect to my LAN on the SGS2 - links appear.

Blog Admin needs to check his site.

EDIT: Ah... it's a WordPress site, 'nuff said.

I just went to a Starbucks and don't see those links. Can you please point that out further?
Google Webmaster Tools' "Fetch as googlebot" feature is useful in debugging these problems.

See http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/fetch-as-googlebot-tool-hacked...

Awesome. Thanks. Should be good now. Though, will test some more.
This sort of malware spreading often hides itself from (a) logged in users and be (b) browser strgins that aren't Google. This can ultimately hurt your Googlerank if for no other reason than serving a different page to Googlebot than you would to outsiders. And yes, Google checks. This is why they used to have a campaign to register your mobile site with them if you were sniffing for mobile useragents.
It's not good. Change your user-agent to googlebot (User Agent Switcher is a good addon for Firefox.)

I accidentally still had it on from trying to read an article that some site was showing exclusively to the googlebot but paywalling for everyone else. If I hadn't, I wouldn't have noticed.

http://imgur.com/rYolfvR

Definitely still showing up for me.
Could it be an issue on your end? All good here.