Tuesday, March 11, 2008

RankWidget Injecting Clicksor Ads on Your Site

My good friend has asked my help late this afternoon regarding the reported pop-up under advertisements that comes out from her site. Upon verification, I was surprised to see that it is not just the pop-up under that was added but a clicksor contextual ad is also implemented. My friend is not that tech-savvy to be able implement such kind of changes so I asked myself if I helped her before. Upon convincing myself that we didn't implement clicksor on her site, I started digging on the codes.

To my surprise, no clicksor code is existing in the templates or even in the widgets. No plugins either that implements clicksor and not even with mightyadsense entries. It is by that time that I decided to remove one-by-one all the javascript from various sources that she implemented that I was able to isolate the problem. Upon removing the technorati rank widget provided by RankWidget, the popup-under went off and the contextual ads no longer showed. For the benefit of the doubt, I re-added the technorati widget and viola.... I see porn popup-under. It's confirmed that the culprit is that widget.

In fairness to RankWidget, the site is already running in their code for several months already. It is only today when they implemented this "changes" that the unwelcome ads came out. It's kinda abusive so we had to take them off our site. Had it been a little more subtle, we wouldn't have known about it wouldn't care to remove it. However, I think it is a very poor judgment on the case of RankWidget. They have just lost almost a hundred of pages with PR linking to their site.

Honestly, I'm not in favor of showing their widgets at all. Though it feels good to see that technorati/alexa/google rank of your site, it is still the service provider that eventually benefits from it.

So friends, beware. Your widgets may already be ripping you off your money.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This happened to me last week, sut down the whole blog. There were very offensive ads being shown as pop ups and the contextual ads as well linked to Clicksor. DO NOT USE Rank Widget anyone! Be very careful guys...it was a pain in the neck trying to figure it out. Great post, this needs to be heard.

Anonymous said...

Hmmm... interested but not really clear, could you explain in more clear...? thanks and success for you

"The Booga Wooga" said...

My name is "Grammy" and I have been maintaining a blog for my grandson since he was 6 months old (he is now 2 years old, photo above). It is a blog about a child so, the content is family-friendly and child-oriented. There are many widgets on the blog and among them, there were 4 Rank Widgets: Alexa, Google, Technorati, and Yahoo. It seemed to me that the Clicksor Ads just appeared one day out of the blue and I never knew why. Even more disturbing, some of the ads had very explicit adult content photos, etc. Needless to say, that is not acceptable as a backdrop to child's blog.

I tried crawling through his blog template several times but, had no luck in determining the source behind the ads. It has been a very frustrating problem on my grandson's blog for almost a year.

Well, last week I had some free time on my hands so, I decided to Google a simple question: "How do you remove Clicksor Ads from a blog?" and, low and behold, up popped the link for your post.

Thank you so much for the information. I immediately removed all 4 of the Rank Widgets from the blog template and just as you said, the ads instantly disappeared. Please feel free to drop by for a visit sometime @ www.akaboogawooga.blogspot.com

rsdkopeecag said...

My blog has a popup like this too and it appeared way before I put the technorati thing so i doubt its this. Can you help me?

My YM is kopee_bui

Anonymous said...

Hi..Your website is good but if u have placed a Tag Cloud Widget that will make your Visitors Wonder...and they can file the Labels easily...
Here is the link to create a Rolling Label Tag Cloud ...
http://moneymakingtipsandcomputertips.blogspot.com/2009/03/rolling-revolving-tag-cloud.html

u can see a Rolling Tag Could on my site ...

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