Have I Been Sneakily Hacked?

I was writing a new post and wanted to link to an older post from it and stumbled onto something very mysterious. The old post I was looking at is about living cheaply in Beijing. If you take a look and scroll down a wee bit you’ll notice two links in the body of the post, one for cleaning supplies and one for phone cards.

I certainly didn’t put those links there. Does anyone have any idea how this could have happened? The only thing I can think of is that I’ve been hacked somehow or that Text Links Ads are doing it. I was given the option ages ago to allow TLA to put links into my old blog posts but I turned them down. I think it’s sneaky and misleads my readers into thinking I’m recommending something I’m not so I told them to stuff that idea.

Ok I’ve just checked… yep. It’s Text Link Ads. Despite me for sure telling them I didn’t want to be a part of this program (I even wrote a post about it) they seem to have added me to it without letting me know. It seems to be easy money and I have $33 lined up as payment which is tempting because the rest of my TLA sites are struggling at the moment. But come on! What’s up with them adding me and not telling me? It’s kind of creepy too that they have the power to go into my blog and change my links. I don’t even think I’ve added any code to my Nerdy Nomad site. How are they pulling this off?

Is anyone else a part of this program? What do you think about letting them pimp out keywords to various sites you probably wouldn’t normally have anything to do with? I’m about to write them a strongly worded email and will let you know what happens.

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