I noticed something strange in a few of my recent articles: any time I wrote "domain.com," it was automatically turning into a clickable link—even though I never hyperlinked it myself. I know WordPress users deal with this too, and at first, I thought Blogger was just overstepping its bounds.
After some digging, I realized Blogger wasn't the culprit at all. It turns out my new Disqus commenting system was the one scanning the post and auto-linking those texts. Here’s a great explanation from Simagin Andrey at SiteAnalyzer on why Disqus does this:
Once I noticed on the pages of my site that each domain or link in the text began to be formatted with a hyperlink of the format <a class="vglnk" href="..., which, when clicked, takes visitors away from the site. At the same time, the data in the HTML editor is "hyperlink" are plain text.
Opening the link properties through the source code research plugin, it turned out that the link has a VGLNK class, which was never used in the CSS styles of this site.
Googling this question, it turned out that the Disqus comment plugin was to be blamed for everything – it was he who turned fragments of plain text, similar to links, into direct hyperlinks of his affiliate sites (apparently Disqus is working with VigLink to post their affiliate links on our own sites. Scoundrel!).<a class="vglnk" href="http://somesite.com" rel="noopener"> <span>somesite</span> <span>.</span> <span>com</span> </a>
Here's how I solved my problem by following Simagin Andrey's solution
- go to the admin panel in your Disqus account.
- go to the settings of a particular site (or go to the address https://yourdomain.disqus.com/admin/settings/advanced/) change "yourdomain" with your domain to jump immediately to the page.
- In the Advanced section, uncheck the box "Affiliate Links: Automatically append merchant codes to product links on your site."
- Press the Save button.
- You are done! Refresh your site and check, those "domain.com" texts are no longer clickable links/hyperlinked.
I really hope this helped you out today! Have a great rest of your week, stay safe, and take care.
