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.