Do you know what adf.ly is?

[theLotter]

I think my site is being spammed by someone using adf.ly to direct crappy links to my site.

Does anyone have experience with them and how to find out who could possibly be harming my site through them?

[igor.pinchevskiy]

Hi Sara,

This is from their site: "

We are a free URL shortener service with a twist..

get paid to share your links on the Internet!

Just register for an account and start shrinking."

Looks like a copy cat of bit.ly (except it doesn't pay you or show ads)

In case you don't know what bit.ly is it basically takes your full URL which sometimes is very long and converts it into a much smaller version something like bit.ly/asdf12 which many internet users like to use and share on their social networks as its much cleaner and shorter...

adf.ly seems to have the same concept except that they will show an AD before taking you to your destination.

Now the question is.

1. Does someone use their service to share a link to your site? That should be ok, as you want people to share your content and there is nothing wrong with using a link shortener...

or

2. Your site actually appears as an AD on the adf.ly site? Then it might look spammy. However in this scenario your site probably belongs to some ad content sharing service which spreads ads across sites like these and displays these useless ads to visitors.

[theLotter]

Although the service itself is legit it is possible for people to abuse their system to spam other sites.

I filed a complaint and was able to add our site to their blocklist.

Thanks for you help!