Sur.ly Free Plugin to Protect Against Link Spam

Discussion in 'Content Management System' started by Alex Surly, Feb 18, 2013.

  1. Alex Surly

    Alex Surly New Member

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    Sur.ly team member (PR)
    Sur.ly reduces danger coming from maleficent links posted by spammers and defends both your website and visitors.

    Introduction:



    Sur.ly is a free plugin for different CMSs (including WordPress and Drupal) that protects your website against any improper content that suspicious users might publish, i.e. spam links posted among user-generated content. This plugin works in its own unique way making your website or forum immune to spam attacks and other problems related to the case. It can be especially helpful if you, for some reason, have decided to disable the pre-moderation on your site or encountered very intensive spam attacks that made manual moderation process inefficient.

    Why is it important to eliminate suspicious outbound links?



    For all professional webmasters and bloggers it is very important to protect relevant visitors from scammers that always try to flood legitimate sites with links to unwanted ads (spam), malware, some illegal, adult or phishing content. Manual pre- or post-moderation appears insufficient in certain situations, as sometimes it can be quite difficult to swiftly verify all comments and all links submitted both by spammers and your normal users. That's the reason to consider Sur.ly as a tool to protect your relevant visitors from getting infected with malware or reaching some undesirable materials while browsing your site, hence to keep your resource safe and creditable.

    It's true that a successful website has to provide high-quality unique content on its webpages, however, another key requirement for a successful website is to check all the links published on its pages (even in the sections for your visitors, like comments, forums etc). That's because Google's search engine inspects all the links a website contains before ranking it, so you must not only publish good content, but also monitor what sort of outbound links are posted at your site (embracing all user-generated links in comments and forum posts). Linking your website to a bad content (maleficent, adult, illegal, etc) will cause search engines to identify it as somewhat of the same kind, so even a single hyperlink to a baneful resource, posted by a spammer in comments under your new article, can entail decrease of your website's hardly gained position in Google and Yahoo search results.

    Besides this, maleficent links published by spammers on your website might provoke AdSense ban (account suspension). This largest advertising network does not tolerate any kind of illegal or adult content, so if your site includes any unsafe outbound links (even in user-generated sections, like comments or forum posts), then you violate AdSense policies and your account is at risk of suspension, with all money you have earned by the moment.

    How can Sur.ly help you?



    Sur.ly plugin makes potentially dangerous user-generated hyperlinks at your site safe both for you and your visitors by replacing them with secure links to interstitial pages on Sur.ly. In other words all suspicious links, probably published by web scammers, will be redirected, examined in terms of their safety, and then opened indirectly, with certain precautions (via interstitial pages showing status of a target page).

    This includes the following benefits and features:

    1. No direct reference from your website to improper resources, therefore its status remains fully legitimate for Google (as well as all other search systems), AdSense and McAfee SiteAdvisor.
    2. Your website visitors are protected from maleficent links - phishing, adult or pirated content will be disclosed and your visitors informed about potential threat.
    3. URL shortening - Sur.ly shortens links posted by users down to alphanumeric identifiers instead of URLs which can be too long or contain some bad words.
    4. Referrer protection - a spam site will get "sur.ly" as the referrer, so the privacy of your visitors will be secured. Suspicious and malicious sites will not be able to track back what source visitors have really come from.
    Sur.ly is available for different CMSs, you can find out more about this project at its website and please do not hesitate to share your feedback!

    References



    Website: http://sur.ly
    WordPress.org Plugin Directory: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/surly/
     

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