I stated last week that Mahalo declined 18 of the 19 links I recommended for inclusion. This was their reasoning…

Thank you for submitting, but we’re concerned that the content on this site contains hidden or somewhat misleading affiliate links.

But then I saw PreemieTwins.com was declined for…

This site is a reported attack site.

WTF!? I made that site eons ago for my premature twins.  So now, as if I’m not busy enough, I have to figure out what’s up.

I googled “preemie twins” and AVG said “This page contains no active threats.” but…. Google says “This site may harm your computer.” Double WTF.  I can rank #1 for those keywords, but who’s gonna visit after Google says my site will install malicious software on their computer!?  First of all, I’m a big advocate AGAINST malware (since it steals MY commissions), and second of all, I don’t think I’m smart enough to even create such scum.

So, my first inclination was that it’s the free wordpress theme I used, so changed that.  Nope, that wasn’t the problem.  Wasn’t any of my plug-ins either.  So, it had to be in my post content.

I go to edit the top post, and there I see it…

< i frame src= ” http: //61.xxx.x.xxx/ iframe/wp-stats.php ” frameborder=”0″ height=”1″ width=”1″>< / i frame>

So I google that and found my answer on the Wordpress forum. My site was injected with a 1px iframe due to a vulnerability in Wordpress 2.2. And yep, I still had 2.2 installed on that site. I’m pretty good about updating to the latest version of WP on my blogs, but this particular blog doesn’t get a lot of my attention as of lately.

So I immediately updated to Wordpress 2.6 - I suggest anyone that still uses 2.2 to do the same RIGHT NOW! But now I have to manually edit EACH and EVERY post as they deposited all kinds of scum links.

That IP address was from China. I just got a package today from China of some Coach purses. They claim they are “authentic”, but c’mon, I got them for a mere fraction of the retail cost. I think they are just damn good knock-offs, but no one has been the wiser.

I almost forgot to do a Free Shirt Friday post today!  Here it is past 5 pm on a Friday, but do any affiliate marketers really work bank hours?  So instead of actually having to get up out of my chair to go to my tote of free tshirts, I looked down to see what shirt I was wearing… an oldie, but a goodie!  I got this shirt from Google.com over a decade ago, and it has been a staple in my collection.  And I didn’t even have to get up to take this pic (note affiliate marketing makes you lazy). Yes, I know my webcam sucks at taking pics and I need a new one, but this way you can’t see all the paint splatters from my new house.

Anyhoo, I love Google.com!  I google (google is official a verb now) absolutely everything, from recipes to potential dates and everything inbetween.  I’ve been using Adwords to bring visitors to my sites and Adsense to make money on my sites for quite a few years now. And then they brought us Gmail and Google Checkout, and I have to use to them all! 

Google just unveiled Knol (short for knowledge) where you can submit articles on specific topics.  Some speculate it will over-rule Wikipedia and Mahalo (Mahalo recently declined 18 of the 19 links I submitted and Jason Calacanis wonders why I use Google over Mahalo).  I’ve already submitted two articles to Knol hoping they will rank well in Google’s natural search results.  Plus you can include your Adsense ID to get credit for the ads that surround your articles (my account is still under review, says the process can take up to 2 weeks).

I think it’s pizza time, cya!

Want to send me a t-shirt to wear on this site for free publicity to promote your website? 
Send to: Kim Rowley, Key Internet Marketing, Inc., PO Box 12, Pierce NE 68767-0012

While I’ve had a busy, busy weekend with our county fair (Pat Green is hot), I’ve also been battling a bug.  No, not the flu bug, nor the brown bottle flu, but some scum adware on my computer.

I noticed on a few of my websites that the common-size banners (ie 468×60, 728×90, 300×250) were changing.  I didn’t think much of it at first as you never know what banner networks and google ads are gonna serve up.  But after I noticed that my own hosted banners were changing, I paid more attention. 

It wasn’t just my sites, it was all websites (the normal surfer wouldn’t even notice the ads being switched out).  I checked a few other computers in the house to make sure it wasn’t my ISP serving up ads, and they were fine. I did come to the conclusion it was only happening in Internet Explorer and not Firefox, and yes I already know I should only be using FF instead of IE, but I’m a creature of habit.

So I ran all of the following free programs to see if they could diagnose the problem (and none could).

McAfee (came installed with my computer)
Lavasoft’s Ad-Adware (I run this frequently. It always tells me the Alexa toolbar is a threat that I usually ignore, but I deleted it this time just in case)
SpyBot Search & Destroy (per a colleague’s suggestion)
CCleaner (after googling my problem, I thought this would help)
AVG (a drinking buddy of mine with very little computer knowledge suggested this one to me, and since he doesn’t always make the wisest choices, I didn’t jump on it.  But I have to admit I installed this on my one of my daughters’ computer after she got “caught something” from downloading a free MySpace theme. And it was so infected that I couldn’t open Ad-Aware or upgrade McAfee, but AVG nipped it in the butt.  Guess I owe him a beer now.)
DoxDesk (checks your browser for parasites)

I even installed the latest version of IE to see if that would help.  Nadda.

Next I downloaded Process Explorer to see all the current running processes on my PC.  And I googled all of the .exe files, and they were all legit.  Can you imagine how frustrated I was at this point in time?!

Finally, thanks to my friend, Pat, who suggested I look at the list of IE plugins to see if a Browser Helper Object was messing with me.  So I disabled helper.dll, and so far no ads being replaced, yeah!  I definitely owe Pat a beer in Boston at Affiliate Summit.

But what makes me the most irate (besides wasting my time fretting over this) is that the average internet user will not even realize this is happening to them.  So honest internet marketers are having their banners over-written and losing commissions to these pond scums.