One of my favorite blogs (a Blogger site) was hacked this past week. All the permanent links were "replaced" with other links. Or so it appeared.

Being someone with the curiosity level of a cat on its third life, I investigated and tried to understand what had happened. In the process, I uncovered numerous references across the Web to a recent wave of referrer spamming.

What a snake pit!

Turns out that some porn sites (perhaps in Romania - perhaps not) are doing a bit of Google boosting. They've copied the look of legitimate blogs and make them appear to have many links. However, the links are not true links, but rather are designed to drive unwary visitors to porn webcams or porn sites.

The following is from the NetWarriors Blog:

"Check out the "weblogs".... All of them have relatively meaningless content, and use javascript document.location instead of a:link to link to other sites. I assume this is yet another attempt at creating an offband reciprocal linkpool to googleboost paying advertisers (which, then, don't get a document.location and a real link instead). Some of the linked weblogs have picked up on being linked (or SPAM-vertised via a referrer-spoof, rather) and have started linking the weblogs in question. *** This, of course, caters right into the hands of the Googleboosters."

Now, a word of caution. Do not visit any of these fake weblog sites unless your javascript is disabled or you are confident of being technically adept enough to deal with the consequences of the obnoxious/malicious stuff they'll launch on you.

For more entries on this subject, check out the related postings at:

WebProWorld Now for something completely different.

WebProWorld Why are these blogs linking to me?

Idly.org Porn sites hiding behind blogs.

Oh, and be careful out there.