I've never met Buffalo Boy, but I helped build his blog and I help him out now and then. Earlier today, I received an S.O.S. email from him. A visit to buffaloboymike.com was resolving at maplemusic.com.
At first I didn't believe it, because it didn't happen in my Firefox. Then, I tried it in IE and saw it with my old eyes. There was clearly a redirect from Buffalo Boy's blog to the official Maple Music website. I tried it in Chrome and saw the same thing. I was intrigued.
I reviewed every line of the source code looking for a redirect script that may have piggy backed its way in there with an image or video Buffalo Boy put on his site. Everything was clean. I checked out the Movable Type templates, deleted the commented out countdown script to Spring Training 2008 and trouble shot this sucker to death, scratching my head the whole time. Then, I had that eureka moment.
Buffalo Boys displays Google ads on his site, as I do. My Firefox suppresses these ads because I use Adblock. That would explain why I wasn't redirected in Firefox but was redirected in IE and Chrome. Lo and behold, when I took out his AdSense code, the redirect stopped.
I've never heard of this, and Googling the issue isn't shedding any light on the subject. How the hell was a Google ad from Maple Music automatically redirecting visitors to maplemusic.com? Does anyone have a clue?
