I clicked through to an article on SeoChat.com called Is the Reciprocal Link Dying a Slow Death? After yet another wave of link request spam this morning (including several for “Christian-oriented web hosting”, which proves they haven’t actually ever read any of the sites they’re requesting link exchanges with) I certainly hope so, but I’ll leave that tirade for another day. Anyway, I was disturbed to see little boxes popping up over certain underlined keywords – within the text of the article – and even more disturbed to find they were advertisements.

I realise that advertising is necessary, but come on – surely this is overdoing it just a little? Navigating through the article, I kept accidently mousing over them causing more boxes to popup, obscuring what I was trying to read. Grrr. I tried clicking on one – in Firefox I get two new windows, one with the web site that has bought the keyword, and another with the atticle index page on seochat. IE only brings up the advertiser’s site.

There’s also a little “What is this?” link which goes to a page describing how and why seochat are assaulting us with this annoying, invasive advertising. Blegh.

It’s all done with JavaScript. Which makes me wish that there was a Firefox extension that let you disable JavaScript on a domain by domain basis. Hmmm… maybe I’ll go check out update.mozilla.org – maybe someone’s thought of that already…