I was not even aware of the term until it hit me. When it hit, it hit very badly.
On this Saturday and Sunday, all my websites showed “ Website Suspended” page and it instructed the webmaster to contact support.
Anxious, I did and it exploded on my face.
One of my website authorcontent.com had been spamvertised. Because the host has zero tolerance for spam, my account was closed. Therefore all my sites were suspended.
What is spamvertising?
I looked up Wikipedia and found this
Spamvertising is the practice of sending E-mail spam, advertising a website. In this case, it is a portmanteau of the words “spam” and “advertising”.
It also refers to vandalizing wikis, blogs and online forums with hyperlinks in order to get a higher search engine ranking for the vandal’s website. Spamvertisers insert links to their websites (typically, sites purporting to sell some commercial product) and add keywords of common or related searches. The apparent goal is that a search engine will find the vandalized page full of links and improve the popularity rating of the pages to which they link. This is typically done by automated editing programs which look for editable text fields in web forms and automatically fill them in with web links. The links typically lead to pills, porn and poker sites.
Authorcontent was a pligg based social bookmarking website where users could post their stories. Somebody spamvertised it. Someone saw that and complained to my host. They found and closed the account.
There go my seven websites for some greedy spammer posting his link.
I was suffering for no fault of mine.
My fault was that I owned that page and I did not monitor the occurrence. My other fault that you can point at is that I did not check my mail where a warning was sent.
But that can happen if you are awfully busy. Moreover that email account is not the one I check regularly.
I explained the situation to my host but no avail. I was being held responsible for not acting on the spammer.In bargaining to get my other sites back I had to shut down Authorcontent.
Keep a watch over your website. It may happen to you too.
Spamvertising may occur where you allow people to post their links. In forum signatures, in blog comments or social marketing sites. Anywhere you give people chance to post link
Keep a check system in place if your website involves multiple users.
Why would host take such an action?
Mostly the complaints come from upstream data centers who supply them the bandwidth. If the host does not show the investigation or action taken, it runs into danger of getting its IP black listed and it would never want that.
How to prevent such situation?
Keep a constant vigilance. That is only method to keep yourself away from getting spamvertised.
Other preventive measures that you can take?
Keep a constant back up of your website. Just in case your host is adamant, you may want to change the host.
That also puts you into better bargaining position.
I have learnt few lessons. I still feel bad about what has happened.
I made this post so that others could be saved from a similar disaster.
God bless and take care.
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This has recently happened to me. My website is hosted on a free domain and all that is on the website is pictures and episode summaries for a TV show I like. Earlier in the week I was unable to login to the site, and unable to view the site. I posted on their forum asking what was going on, and someone suggested my website had been hacked as Google was reporting it as malicious. I then emailed the webhosting people who sent one line back to me:
My website was reported as spamvertized and they had blocked it.
Nothing suggesting why this may have happened, and what I could do about it.
From what I can tell, I cannot get my website back. And I still don’t know what happened. It didn’t get a lot of visitors and wasn’t even spidered into Google. There was no way for anyone to add data to the site, so it must have been hacked for some reason but i’m left with no website and no information.