Over the past week or so I have had a few people ask me this question on Myspace and I thought that it would be a good idea for me to explain the possible reasons why Myspace convert all links (that link to anywhere other than Myspace’s site) to msplinks.
The conversion of external links has been in place for quite a while now and I am surprised that I am still getting asked about it, but I don’t mind, it’s not exactly hard to explain.
Msplinks.com - a Background
Msplinks.com is owned by Mark Monitor, an online fraud prevention service, and is now used by Myspace to filter out “bad URL’s” and help protect their users.
What happens is that anytime you place a link to an external site on Myspace, it converts the URL to something like http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LmZyZWVkaXZzLmNvbQ== which when clicked will instead of going straight to the website that has been linked to, it will show you a page saying that you are now leaving Myspace.com and going to the website that has been linked to. It is slightly annoying at first, but you get used to having to do it, and there are good reasons for Myspace doing this.
This will be applied to all future links anywhere on the site, but not any links you have made in the past (so only when a new link is created).
The Reasons
Phishing
This is possibly the number one reason why Myspace implemented this feature, it was to combat the increasing threat of “phishing” sites (those that have copied Myspace’s code and use it to get you to enter your email and password, so they can gain access to your account). Having the page telling you that you are leaving Myspace will hopefully make users realize if they come across one of these phishing sites, and hopefully prevent them from entering their details.
To Filter out “bad sites”
Myspace must have a list of what they consider as being “bad sites” which this new feature will check against the URL that they are converting, and disallow it if it is on their list. The types of sites that will be on this banned list are phishing sites, other scam sites and sites that are notorious for being spammed on Myspace.
Advantages and Disadvantages
The advantages of this feature should be self explanatory, they protect Myspace users online security even further by filtering links and making sure you know when your leaving Myspace.
The disadvantages will depend on what you use Myspace for. If you are just the normal user then the only disadvantage will be that it’s a bit annoying having to go to a kind of splash page before going to the URL you were trying to click. But for those who use Myspace as an advertising means (e.g. webmasters) this is a bigger problem, it stops them from getting backlinks to their sites for SEO purposes and quite possibly causes a decrease in the amount of people who click the links.
In my opinion this is a great security feature that Myspace have implemented, you get used to it after a while anyway and it does mean that there is a decrease in the amount of spammers that are just looking for backlinks to their site.
Related:
Responses to “Why do my links change to Msplinks?”
November 24th, 2008 at 7:39 am
Well even ebay is on the list of bad sites. I can’t link to an auction of mine for example.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
It’s not a “great security feature” because it obfuscates links - if a bad site is linking from myspace, you have no way of knowing before clicking that link. It actually makes security *worse*.
And it goes against what the internet is all about. A link is supposed to point to where it goes. It is at least bad form, and in some (many) quarters considered a black hat practice, to obfuscate all of your url’s.
And it’s terrible for SEO. Let’s say I have a legitimate company that has a MySpace page. I’ve spent a lot of time making it a nice, useful page where my customers can keep up with what we’re doing. Those customers in turn have friended me because they like my company and my page. All of us collectively have invested a lot of time and effort into that page, and consequently that page has a lot of “votes” going to it from my friends and from other people linking to it from around the internet. Why shouldn’t that translate into Google PageRank? That is in fact what PageRank is all about.
In essence, MySpace has become just another PageRank black hole with these obfuscated links. I think everybody should be nofollowing all of their links to MySpace as long as they’re doing this.
April 8th, 2009 at 12:20 am
Hi Jeff,
Any msplink takes you to a page telling you that you are going off of Myspace and onto a different site. Then tells you what site you are going to. So no, I don’t agree that it obfuscates links.
Also, you shouldn’t need to look at the URL of where the link is pointing to take an educated guess at where the link is going to go unless of course it is a spam/phishing link aimed to trick you into clicking it (which is the main reason I am for the msplinks).
I agree to an extent what you are saying about SEO. I mentioned it in this post. But Myspace has become a site that people use to spam to get backlinks and search engines wouldn’t weigh the links that highly because of this known problem.
I do know a considerable amount about SEO strategy but I also know a lot about owning and developing a website (including web security) and I think that Myspace have taken the correct steps to minimize the spam and phishing attempts to protect their users (which is a much bigger prioroty than getting people to use their site for SEO backlinks).
October 24th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
I’ve also noticed it will not allow me to post a freewebs site link either. I wonder why it’s on the list of “bad sites”.