Why are there skimwords/skimlinks links on my blog?

November 20, 2012 12:27 PM

Why are there skimwords/skimlinks links on my blog? I have a self-hosted Wordpress site, and I am the sole owner/administrator. As far as I can tell, I haven't installed any plugins that could be doing this. Has anyone heard about this? I want them gone. The first occurrence of "singer songwriter" on my page is a skimlink
posted by kaboomer to computers & internet (9 answers total)

I'm not seeing them. Your browser/PC might be hacked.
posted by damn dirty ape at 12:29 PM on November 20, 2012

Yeah, malware can do this.
posted by Miko at 12:31 PM on November 20, 2012

Is this happening only when you visit your Wordpress site? Does it happen from every computer/browser you use?
posted by griphus at 12:37 PM on November 20, 2012

Sorry, I removed your link to your blog, we have rules against self-promotion here, but I didn't see links in those phrases, chances are like the first two answers said, you have malware of some sort on your computer. Test this by trying a friend's computer on another network. We're definitely not seeing them here as random outsiders.
posted by mathowie at 12:38 PM on November 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

I'd be curious how to remove this anyway as I have the same problem with a Wordpress site that I frequent but do not own (and do not log in to). Any advice beyond "remove malware"? My googlefu is failing.
posted by mattbucher at 1:31 PM on November 20, 2012

Give Malwarebytes a shot at cleaning up the infection.
posted by dobi at 1:47 PM on November 20, 2012

Also, MS has a free malware remover executable as well.

http://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-security/malware-removal.aspx
posted by damn dirty ape at 2:10 PM on November 20, 2012

Check your browser extensions for something called "PageFont" and remove it. Let me know if that works.
posted by meghan_skimlinks at 10:51 AM on November 21, 2012

Hi Everyone:

Metafilter isn't emailing me to let me know there are responses to my question, for some reason, so I didn't see these until just now. Thanks for the answers!

I did check my site on other computers/browsers and didn't see the problem, so it must be my FF installation. Meghan, I found and removed PageFont, and that seems to have fixed things.

Thanks again!
posted by kaboomer at 10:32 AM on November 24, 2012