01 April 2007

A Shortcut to Sell Snake Oil

I ran into these two sites during the last month:-

The only reason I clicked on the links was because they were on the Blogspot.com domain. I always look at chess blogs, but neither of them looks anything like a blog. They both look like typical fly-by-night marketing pages of the 'Improve Your XYZ While You Sleep' genre. 'How does that work?', I asked myself.

In fact, both URLs are constructed with a trailing '#'. When I remove that character and feed the URL to my browser, the page look like a blog -- a really boring blog, but a blog nevertheless. The trick appears to be a combination of the '#' character and a URL in the blog description with the format 'javascript:OOO('abc');'.

Where is this trick documented? Can it be misused for something more harmful than selling Get Rich Quick books?

3 comments:

Robert Pearson said...

These same guys had the spam blog comments all over Blogger until the word verification came in.

It's pretty funny to think that this is some kind of get-rich-quick scheme...chess isn't exactly a big money sport.

Mark Weeks said...

'It's pretty funny to think that this is some kind of get-rich-quick scheme'

No one has ever accused spammers of being smart. - Mark

Robert Pearson said...

Touche'

:)