Text Ad Links : What they are, and how to get rid of them.

Text Ad Links. What are they? Those annoying hotlinks connected to certain keywords on a website. When you click on them, they take you to an advertisement.

Here's some info on this technique:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-text_advertising

In other words, it's a scam/adware, and should have no part on your website! As you're admiring your content-rich, newly redesigned, SEO-optimized OPP site, you start noticing these ugly ad links popping up over certain keywords. Before you write an angry email to support, know that OPP would never sell you out for ad revenue!

There are a couple of reasons this could be happening, and some things you can check.
  • Look at your OPP site in a few browsers. Is this happening in only one browser, and is definitely not any special formatting you input into your artist statement? If it is happening in only one browser, it is possible that that browser has been infected with some kind of “secure your computer” or “accelerate your web experience” trojan software that installed ads into your browser.
  • Is this happening on any other website, such as cnn.com, or on our main site, otherpeoplespixels.com? If so, it's something local to your computer (or ISP, Internet Service Provider), as those two sites would never have ads built into the text.

If you are experiencing this issue in Firefox, please check out this add-on that can help you combat the issue:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/

And here are some other sites, for you to reference as well:

http://download.cnet.com/Safari-AdBlock/3000-2378_4-10793198.html

http://download.cnet.com/Adblock-for-Chrome/3000-11745_4-75000931.html

(As always, download files from the internet at your own risk!)

In addition to installing helpful addons, you could also try uninstalling the infected browser, and reinstalling it -- and hopefully that will clear up any type of trojan software that may have installed the ads into your browser.

Begone, Ad Links!