Bloggers Beware: Cloaked Malicious Links As Referrals

Bloggers Beware: Cloaked Links Can Be Malicious

Bloggers Beware of Malicious Link Cloaking

As bloggers, we often get excited when studying the statistics of our blog traffic.  We like to find out where our traffic is coming from.  One way to identify new traffic sources is to check the Referring URLs.  In other words, we are checking what specific sites have been sending traffic to our site. 

In the Bloggers Beware image at the top of this post, you can see a sample of some of the sites that have been reffering traffic to one of my blogs.  In the above image you can see Referring URLs from:

1. Reddit.com
2. Greedy Goblin and Kuja's Gold Mine - Both similar sites within my gaming niche.
3. 2 Cloaked Links that I have outlined in red.

Why would those links be showing up as cloaked links? 

Malicious Link Cloaking

Because they are links back to a malicious site.  By cloaking the link, the malicious attacker is increasing the odds of you clicking on that link and visiting the malicious site.  This also explains the 28 referrals coming from the malicious site.  There is no real traffic coming from this cloaked site.  A potential attacker is cloaking the links and automating the process of sending false referrals in attempts to get me to click on the malicious links.  How do I know they are malicious?  I did a internet search for the site url that this cloak re-directs to and sure enough this link re-directs to a malicious code site.

So bloggers be careful!  Be careful when clicking on these types of cloaked links as they can comprimise the security of your site and your computer.  This doesn't mean that all cloacked or link shortened links are malicious.  You may even see shortened links from links that you may have posted to various social media sites.  Links from Twitter (built in link shorteners) and Aweber (if you have it set to post to your Facebook or Twitter) can appear this way as well.  See where it starts to get easy to fall into the trap?  Don't just think it is safe to start clicking on links in your Referral URLs report without investigating first.  Always be smart and safe about what you click or download on the web.

I hope this post saves some other bloggers from the malicious attempts of cloaked Referral URLs.

How To Build An Image Link

Linking An Image To A Page

Here is the basic code for creating a link to a page from an image.  It is very similar to creating a text link, except that we are going to use an image instead of anchor text.

First make sure to either upload you image to your directory and copy the url location of the hosting site or find the url of the image online that you want to use.

Don't put a space between the 2 sets of code because some browsers will place a small box after them image, which looks odd.

<a href="Enter the URL of the page to link HERE"><img src="Enter your image link here"/></a>

How To Create A Text Link

Linking

Linking is one of the basic concepts that some bloggers have trouble with.  Here is a simple template for creating any text based link on your site.  It is a simple task once you know you to do it. 

Every link is based off of the 3 things:

• HTML Tags
• Destination URL Link
• Anchor Text

It is very important that you use strong keyword rich anchor text that is relevant to the article or page you will be linking.  Review the Importance of Proper Anchor Text*, if you need assistance with linking properly.


Creating Text Links

The standard code for a basic text link is as follows:

<a href="InsertURLLinkHere"/>AnchorTextHere</a>

*An example of the proper way to link above actually looks like this as the HTML Code:

<a href="http://bloggingvitals.blogspot.com/2010/12/anchor-text-and-proper-linking.html"/>Importance of Proper Anchor Text</a>

Make sure to properly link for text links as this will be an important tool when:

• Leaving Comments With Links On Other Sites
• Creating Internal Links
• Creating Affiliate Links To Products
• Linking To Your Own Site When Guest Posting

Internal Linking For Your Blog

Build Traffic With Internal Links

Using internal links is a great way to help grow your site's relevance and your traffic.  If you have a great blog topic or an excellent post someone may decide to steal your content.  Someone also could use a feed of your blog posts on their own page.  This is a very common tactic in some niche markets where a site owner will create a main site that is an aggregate of many other sites.  It's not a bad thing, you just want to be able to traffic back to your site from those feed syndicating sites.  Some sites will just syndicate the titles of the posts and force readers to the original site.  These are great sites that will send traffic your way, but often you are competing with many other titles and content from authors within your field.  On the other hand, some sites will syndicate your entire article, so it is important to provide an option for drawing those readers back to your main site.

An example (from my main site's niche) of a great feed syndicate site that only lists the post titles and forces readers back to the original site is wowheadlines.com.  This sites shows current posts for WoW blogs and breaks them down into separate niche categories.

Often times your blog posts will appear on other people's sites as they are syndicating your every post.  If you are using internal links within your posts, then when your content gets syndicated on someone else's page, there will be an embedded link in the post content that can send the viewers back to your original site.  This is a great way to get new traffic from outside sources.  If you don't include internal links to other pages on your blog, then this opportunity to get traffic and readers from syndicated sites will be lost.  This is even more important, if the aggregate site doesn't list the original author's site in the feed syndication.  Another site could be reaping the benefits of all the hard work you put into your content.  You want to use syndicate sites to your advantage by always linking to your own pages within your content.

Internal linking also helps to spread your page rank around your site.  Linking pages with proper anchor text also helps to build relevance by helping to teach the search engines what each page is about.  Internal linking also serves to help navigate your visitors around your site.

Anchor Text and Proper Linking

Here is the Linking Policy from my main site. 

I encourage you to link to my content as you like, just give credit and please use the correct standards when creating links to my content.

Let's look at the first sentence of a post on another blog (Link examples are underlined):

"Cold’s post yesterday started churning my thoughts on reputation items."

What I am asking as that if you link back to my blog, please use good linking practices that help with search engine optimization to help build page ranks. The current way you have me linked is a poor job in regards to SEO and rankings.

You never want to attach a link to words like "post", "this", "here", etc.  You want the link text to show the topic of what you ae linking to.
Examples:

BAD
Great post. Read it Here.

GOOD
Great post. Read about The Effects of Undercutting.

See the difference? The Effects of Undercutting link tells the web bots that rank links and pages exactly what this link is about and thus builds relevance for the linked site.

Having a link to my site that is just the link word "Post" gives no relevance, gives no ranking assistance, and creates a link with no relevance either. If you aren't sure what to link, just use the Title of the Post as the linking text.

Be sure to follow the same standards when linking within your own pages as well. This will help build your ranking and the ranks of pages you link to, if done correctly.