Avoid The Dark Side Of Plugins
Okay, so we’ve all heard Kyle say time and time again not to put more plug-ins on our websites that are not absolutely required. This is because typically, the more plug-ins you have on your site, the longer it takes your site to load.
Recently, I found another reason to really watch what plug-ins do to your site. The social sharing plug-in that I was using had started to get a bit dated, and updates have not been frequent at all. So, I decided I needed to find a new social plug-in and installed Shareaholic.
Shareaholic has a pretty good reputation online, and has a lot of five-star reviews associated with it from other users. However, after I installed it, I noticed one setting that was set to on by default, being related posts. Normally, when you see a related post option, plug-ins will display multiple posts from your site that are related to the content that you’re talking about in your current post.
Related posts are actually a great way to get users to engage with additional content all over your website on various topics. However, the related posts feature included with this specific plug-in doesn’t do what you would normally think.
As you can see below, when enabled, the related posts feature of this plug-in tries to send traffic to other websites all over the Internet. Worst of all, these links are affiliate links for the creators of the plug-in.
Personally, I think this is a dirty trick, and worst of all, new users may not even realize that these links are affiliate links. Just wanted to give everyone a heads up and a reminder to always check your site and see exactly what plug-ins are really doing in the background.
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I found an old blog post about this issue from 2014:
"The Shareaholic WordPress plugin has recently begun hijacking affiliate links. On September 4th, 2014, without any update required, or any notification to the users of the plugin, Shareaholic began overriding links and placing Viglink affiliate links on sites that use their social sharing plugin."
Source: http://morefromyourblog.com/shareaholic-wordpress-plugin-hijacking-affiliate-links/
There's another plugin called "Rating-Widget" to watch for that's pointed out in the comments:
"As I said, they were some links to my site with modified links ( see them see when you copy the link) , with links monetized to Viglink , after tracing where he came I realized that it was for this plugin, and looking at meeting new terms of service “You Agree That if you are using the free version we VigLink monetization May activate service on your site . We use VigLink to turn non -affiliated links on your site to Become Affiliated with RatingWidget . This disclosure is provided in Accordance with The Federal Trade Commission ‘s 16 CFR § 255.5 : Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising . “
Source: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/the-links-have-monetization-with-viglink
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This is good info, thanks for the heads up...I have bookmarked too, for the next time the question comes up...Cheers! Dave : )
Thanks Dave, glad I could be of assistance!