YJL

I just saw a referral from adf.ly:


I didn't click on that link, because I didn't know what it actually was, even apparently it's some sort of shortened URL. I googled it and read a few pages of results.

Clearly, I dislike adf.ly.

Making money out of your shortened link is fine, but it's not fair (because the owner of linked content isn't getting anything if differ than link creator) and you can bet that attracts bad people, who makes money by cheating.

(Please forgive me for not linking you to what I've read, I intentionally do not want to link to those pages)

In one discussions, OP said his Google AdSense account got banned because of adf.ly traffic, which he bought. So, you see how this is going. People buy traffic, although I have no idea how this kind of things work, it must be different than AdWords' method, that might be the reason why he got banned.

One reply is very interesting, How about you do that to your competing website to get them banned? I have to say this is devious. You buy them some traffic or make tons of shortened links for them, they would be astonished by sudden traffic and ecstatic by upcoming paycheck, which would never come.

From the search results, there are a lot of bots and scripts, well, for cheating to next level, I believe. One can automatically convert all links in your content to adf.ly.

Some people are really using every measure to make money online, it's pretty ugly through my eyes. Why can't they write good content and only wish receiving good feedback? If you can have those, people naturally will link to, refer to, and the worst, steal your content, whether you like or not. Wasting time doing those cheats, SEO tricks, just pathetic.

By the way, I still don't know the link in the screenshot will lead me to. I didn't click, because it can be fake referrer and probably links to other site. So, that's another method you can cheat.

If you are a user of Pentadactyl, you might have noticed whenever you press y on a video of YouTube, you always gets the shortlink. It's been a few months since I first noticed this nice feature.

Recently, I wanted to learn about it, before I dug into codes to find out this fantastic feature is from, I always assumed that's somehow YouTube's effort. I thought there must be some way to intercept URL copying in address bar. Some hook, I supposed. But I was wrong totally, however, gladly, I didn't dive into those minified JavaScript codes.

I first discovered YouTube have a shortlink relation in its HTML,

<link rel="shortlink" href="http://example.com/promo">

This really gave me a hint, so I read Pentadactyl's changes and saw this addition:

Added 'yankshort' option. [b8]

 It is all clear to me now. By default,

:set yankshort
--- Options ---
  yankshort=youtube.com,bugzilla.mozilla.org

There seems no options to disable shortlink yanking unless you remove the site from yankshort option, if you really need the full URL and don't want to copy from address bar or statueline. A quick resolution is to map a new key to yank full URL:

map Y :yank gBrowser.contentDocument.location.href<CR>

I really have no idea why I thought YouTube did that. Anyway, I think browsers should provide a link copying button or menu item with shortlink as an option, I saw none in Firefox. I guess this is the reason that YouTube provides shortened link option in share panel.

I noticed there is a referrer URL via Bit.ly (a shortening URL service), the third URL in the following screenshot:


I believe it's a fake and I didn't find out by clicking on it. I was trained well to know I could append a "+" (plus symbol) at the end of Bit.ly URL, which would brings you to an information page about that link. The shortened URL is an alias of the following link:


By reading the information on that stats page is enough to conclude that indeed is a spam link. First of all, the website's title clearly is one that standard garbage website would have. Secondly, it's a listing website, you can know that from that original URL.

If you are a real person, I really don't believe that you will use a trash website like that. I did check out that website, eventually. I am guessing those entries are all automatically created just like other link farm websites. That website is not only lame but also pathetic, you doesn't even look like a good copy website. The referral could be real, but I highly doubt it. Most likely, it's a fake.

By the way, the first link in that screenshot is a fake, which I am 100% sure, because it has been spamming endlessly in the last few weeks. This is not the first time I got spammed by .ua ccTLD.

If you have good eyes, you should have also recognized the fifth links is a fake, too. Links contain words like product, store, or shop are very possible to be fakes, you can bet all your money on it.

Well, it seems 3 fakes at once are just not enough, the fourth link is a fake one, too. It has 9 links in that non-blog-but-spam post, all of 9 links link to Facebook, something called facebook.com/notes/ pages, I guess. That 9 links are actually fitting into a style of spam described in this Google post, which is totally unrelated to the post content. They, the post content, are generated by templates, probably different that the templates of linked spam content. By the way, this is the first time I know Facebook has that, I thought there is only Facebook pages. Facebook is really confusing if you are not a regular user.

I really hate these guys. Four fakes in just 2 hours.