free wp theme – adding its own hidden keywords/advertising to theme? or VIRUS?

  • hello
    i just pulled my website up and these words were showing up on the top margin of the free wp theme we are using ( ‘canyon’ )……. normally there is a black bar across the top of the screen – some sort of margin that we didn’t know what purpose it served.

    well today that entire margin across the top is showing the following – what appears to be some kind of keyword list for some company called georgia payday loan. these words are all in dark font almost hidden and some of the words are bolded.

    do the free wp themes typically have built in hidden advertising?

    any other ideas what might have caused this?

    thanks.

    [Mod note – no need to copy spam here]

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
  • Thread Starter Shangrala

    (@shangrala)

    A big part of this problem is we are using this theme for a medical related website where we are dealing w/ highly educated professionals. now when they come to our site they see cheap advertising for a pay day loan company…………… there goes the credibility out the door LOL

    Andrew Nevins

    (@anevins)

    WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

    Where did you get the theme from?

    Thread Starter Shangrala

    (@shangrala)

    i believe it was web2feel (or something similar) will have to look it up – but its strange that this advertising started to become visible now – we have been building this site for over a month and this is the first time its shown up.

    Thread Starter Shangrala

    (@shangrala)

    Current Theme
    Canyon

    By Jinsona
    Free WordPress theme released by web2feel.com

    think i will re install the theme and see if that doesn’t solve this problem…….

    anyone have any ideas on why this might happen?

    thanks.

    Andrew Nevins

    (@anevins)

    WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

    It might just be built into the theme. Try using a theme distributed on www.ads-software.com, these themes are checked thoroughly not to operate this way.

    Switch to a default theme like Twenty Eleven to check whether it is just the theme.

    Have you checked to see if your site has been hacked?

    https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/

    Moderator cubecolour

    (@numeeja)

    I would never use or recommend themes from that supplier, they sneak sponsored links into the footer via functions in obfuscated code which are difficult to remove, these are shown when normal visitors view the site, but are designed to be hidden to anyone logged in as an admin – as the site owner might usually be at least when initially building the site. This practice goes against the GPL licensing that is mandatory for themes to adhere to as they inherit the license from WordPress as a derivative work.

    Get a theme from https://www.ads-software.com/extend/themes/ or a commercial theme from one of the vendors listed at https://www.ads-software.com/extend/themes/commercial/

    This might also be helpful:

    https://www.chipbennett.net/2010/12/10/only-download-wordpress-themes-from-trusted-sources/

    Thread Starter Shangrala

    (@shangrala)

    WPyogi thanks for the posted links! I ran the scan and it checked out ok.

    apparently this is built into the code of that theme. when i used BING to search for one of our domains using this free wp theme it pulled up the domain w/ all the same advertising showing up in the results (showing up as the content of the website – when there wasnt any content installed yet).

    any ideas where to look to try and delete this content from the theme?

    cubecolour
    sounds like you are familiar w/ this company. thank you for the links plan to check those themes out.

    went ahead and deleted the theme then loaded it back up – the advertising is gone. For now we atleast this will have to do until we figure out what we want to do as far as purchasing a theme etc.

    regards

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
  • The topic ‘free wp theme – adding its own hidden keywords/advertising to theme? or VIRUS?’ is closed to new replies.