Category: Spam

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You’ve probably seen it: comments that say something entirely vague and either flattering or condescending, that could apply to just about any article. And then they link to an “escort” site, or a pill seller…or some small-town insurance office in the middle of nowhere who hired a black hat “SEO expert” who promised he’d get them backlinks and doesn’t care about the site’s reputation.

I got a great one last week: Somehow instead of getting one randomly-chosen message from a set, I got all of them in one comment: Continue reading →

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Over on another blog, I noted that Netflix’s new DVD name Qwikster sounded familiar. I got some support requests and a small spam run, including this comment:

I keep getting these creepy late-night phone calls from the CEO of Netflix saying that no one else is ever going to love me like he does.

Why do I get the feeling that someone read Woot’s parody of the post?

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Opened up a spam trap I’d forgotten about and found ~40 copies of some — well, I hesitate to call it a newsletter, but it was a long collection of headlines, summaries, and links to news items and dubious reference sites that looked like someone had taken a few dozen conspiracy theories, put them into a blender, and then splattered them onto the page like Jackson Pollack.

At least, I want to believe it’s some horribly-mangled computer-generated aggregation…but it wouldn’t surprise me if it turns out to be someone’s serious attempt to create a newsletter without being able to write a coherent sentence.

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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.