Spamvertising is the practice of sending E-mail spam, advertising a website. The word is a portmanteau of the words "spam" and "advertising".
It also refers to vandalizing blogs, online forums, or wikis with hyperlinks in order to get a higher search engine ranking for the vandal's website. Spamvertisers insert links to their websites (typically, sites purporting to sell some commercial product) and add keywords of common or related searches. The apparent goal is that a search engine will find the vandalized page full of links and improve the popularity rating of the pages to which they link. This is typically done by automated editing programs that look for editable text fields in web forms and automatically fill them in with web links. The links typically lead to pills, porn, and poker sites.
Most legitimate website providers do not tolerate this practice and will delete any site that has been spamvertised. This practice has led to many editable online resources employing anti-spam countermeasures, including the use of captchas to prevent automated editing.
If you've received this notification from the Abuse Department via SpamCop, you'll be provided with information stating which website was spamvertised as well as a link to update/resolve the case with SpamCop. You'll need to ensure that you've visited the provided SpamCop link and selected the appropriate option for your case as well, ensure that your link is no longer spamvertised if applicable.
So what does “spamvertized” mean?
A site being “spamvertized” means that the site is being included as a link in spam emails. The most common reason your site appears in spam emails when you’re not the spammer is that your site has been hacked by someone.
The hacker places a small piece of code somewhere on your site that redirects a user to a different site. They do this because including their own website in emails they send will immediately flag spam detectors. Their site is already a known-bad-site. So they’d rather spamvertize your site to try and get more emails through spam filters.
This works for a while until your website is also associated with spam and they have to move on to another “clean” website that they can spamvertize and that will redirect to their own site.
Once the hacker has sent out enough spam that includes a link to your site (which redirects to their site), your website becomes associated with spam (and blocked by spam filters). This is about the time you find out that your site is being “spamvertized” because your host will receive complaints about emails that include links to your site.
WordPress and spamvertized sites
This is one of the main reasons today why WordPress sites are hacked – because spammers need new “clean” sites to spamvertise and redirect to their own sites.
Plugin "Wordfence" does a great job of hardening your site against such attacks and preventing hackers from gaining access. Even if they do gain access, Wordfence will alert you that your files have changed and no longer match what is in the official WordPress repository or that your site contains malicious URL’s in your files or in the database.
Wordfence has a free and paid version as per the customer's requirement. You can also install alternative security plugins and tools of your choice to mitigate such issues.
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