Another blogging public service announcement: “Like-spamming”

You know those people who come along and “like” something on your blog, but when you go to check out their blog you don’t find a blog, but a website trying to sell you up for some kind of marketing scheme?  I’ve come to think of this as “like-spamming”– the people who seem to go around and click like on everything, just to create as many opportunities as possible to draw more people in to their site.

I always wanted to give those people the benefit of the doubt.  I thought maybe at one point they had a blog like me, and found out they could make more money doing X, Y, Z.  Maybe they still had a real blog somewhere and just forgot to include the link to it.

And me being such a nice person, I like to check out the blog of everyone who comes to mine, just to give back some support (sorry if I’ve missed anyone!).

Well today I just did that, and decided to see what all of these marketing promotions were about.  For the first time ever, I actually clicked on a link on one of those pages.

Immediately a notification from Norton Anti-Virus pops up, warning me it had just protected my computer from a “well-known malicious attack.”  The offending URL, sure enough, matched the link I had clicked on.

Now let me just say that it takes a lot for Norton to actually call something both well-known and malicious.  I’ve almost never seen it put anything in the “Code Red” category.  Normally it just warns me that something might be suspicious.

Which means that the scammers who built this link were pretty brazen.  They didn’t work too hard to disguise their attack, probably because they know that bloggers are, on the whole, such an open and trusting bunch.

But that’s it for me: no more feeling guilty about ignoring some of the people who click “like” on my blog.  From now on, if I click on someone’s profile and I don’t actually see a blog–blog, then forget it, I’m out of there.  I advise all of my readers to do the same!

Troll photo: Marchange