Bloggers Beware: topblogstories

Dear blogger friends,

If you have been checking your stats lately, you may have noted this dubious referring site "topblogstories" which may have increased (quite unusually) the traffic to your blog.

For the love of BLOG, please DO NOT click the link. And if you have...then you may have been led to either a fat-loss ad or a pornographic site. 

Please read this post from thenewfr0ntier.blogspot.com for some  really useful information.

I am quite grateful that I never found the interest of clicking this until today and the site seems to have gone AWOL (probably from all the info-blog posts that have been getting around).

Lessons for All of Us:

1. Never click anything you do not know or trust (if it looks dubious, then it may be is).
2. Google first before you click (Research, research, research before you believe anything; verify sites or links through a query engine like Google).

As in beauty, experiences, falling into all sorts of emotions, friendships, food and life --- we try to achieve the balance of adventure and taking precautions. 

We take calculated risks and educated guesses from the seemingly trivial choices in a beauty counter to overwhelming significant milestones of our BIG dream:

• Should I spend or save on a big-tooth wooden comb?
• Should I take that plunge into the longest zipline?
• Should I master the art of letting go, once and for all?
• Should I lend an old friend an amount which may be paid after N years?
• Should I take the risk of eating a spoonful of allergen mixed in that delicious cordon bleu?
• Should I say to LIFE: Throw away that corporate suit and bring it on?

Hahaha. And although some decisions and outcomes hurt us, we will look back someday and say that these are all worth the realizations and lessons learned.

Stay safe my friends and keep on blogging. =)

P.S. Additional FYI --- Got this from one of the admin comments to thenewfr0ntier's post:

"Given the (exponentially) higher than average views of this post, the wide variety of blogs being run by those who've commented, as well as the recent registration of the topblogstories.com domain, it appears as though the owners of the site are harvesting the URLs of legitimate blogs, embedding them in images, and using their own resources to click on the links. This saturates blogger's referral entries with back links to their site, thereby achieving a higher search engine ranking as Google indexes them. 

With regard to site security, receiving a referral from topblogstories.com shouldn't pose any threat to your blog, but always be sure to take the proper precautions before clicking on a link, such as using an updated anti-virus program, software firewall, router, and updated patches - especially if you use Windows. Other tools such as SandboxIE, No Script for Firefox, as well as a virtual machine can significantly reduce the possibility of infection." 

UPDATE: Another suspicious referring site "blogsrating.pw" is on the prowl. Noted this on my stats just now and it replaced topblogstories in the top 5 spots.

"blogsrating.pw is a "referral spam". It's part of the other spam site FLF-course.com... It's trying to sell you (at the time of writing this) weight loss solutions." (Credits: Grabbed this comment of Jason Coulls from the hiddenopportunity.blogspot.com's post: Hidden Opportunities: Current.com and Blogsrating.pw)