In clearing out my spam folder today, I found the following message:

Bad Link on hyperborea.org

Dear webmaster,

There was a link that didn’t work for me on this page of your website, http://www.hyperborea.org/flash/flashpoint.html. It points to a Constitution Day page that doesn’t seem to be there any more, [link removed].

We published a great resource on the U.S. Constitution Day on Online Law School.Net: [link removed]. It would make a great addition to your resources and replacement for the page that no longer works.

Sincerely,

Maddie Bryant
[email removed]

On the surface, it sounds like a reasonable message. If you’ve got a broken link, then you want to know, and hey, if they’ve got an alternative, so much the better, right?

But here’s the thing: The broken link isn’t on the page. I don’t think I link to that page anywhere on my site. There is a reference to the 22nd Amendment, but not to anything about Constitution Day.

In short, it’s another form of link swap spam based on automatic keyword matches with no real intelligence to it.

That’s not really something I want to be linking to.