So, Gentle Reader, if you had been perusing this Tohu Bohu between, say, five and ten this morning (EDT), you might have seen some blogspam. Perhaps. Probably not.
Three comments were left, each one consisting of a word hyperlinked to what Your Humble Blogger assumes is a pay-porn site. I deleted them without checking it out, I’m afraid. If any of y’all are having difficulty finding pay-porn, well, you can let me know, and I’ll see if I can find the link.
Anyway, what I thought was odd was that the three notes to which the comments were attached were from eleven weeks ago. They weren’t even particularly popular threads; one had nine comments before the spam, but the others had only two. None of them had been active recently, either. It just seems ... so ... worthless.
I mean, if you figure that only one or two people out of a hundred would have clicked the link anyway, and that of those who did, presumably only a few would have actually paid for the porn, and that there are only maybe twenty people who read the site anyway, and that of those twenty pretty much nobody goes back and checks two-month-old comments, then the fact that this whole business is pretty much cost-free is countered by the fact that it’s pretty much revenue-free as well. In fact, the only person who would have been at all likely to have even seen the links would be Your Humble Blogger, who of course would be the person most likely to be angered by them, and the person least likely to be in the mood to pay somebody for porn. Or pr0n. I mean, I know people are stupid about sex, but the percentage of people who are turned on by unsolicited advertisements on their blogs has got to be pretty darned low.
As it happens, I’m not angry, I’m just perplexed. I mean, was there a meeting between the guy who did the robot code and the guy who runs the pay-porn site, where this whole advertising plan was discussed in detail? Step one: one word hyperlinks in old comments pages of miniscule blogs. ... Step Three: Satisfied paying customers!
,
-Vardibidian.
This happened on my journal as well. I found myself wondering why it was only a few older entries, and nothing on the most recent ones. One possibility, I considered, was that maybe the older pages had been indexed in search engines, whereas newer entries hadn’t yet been picked up? Of course, that doesn’t explain why it would only be a couple of entries, instead of all of the older ones.
I didn’t really care enough about it to spend time looking into it. I guess it’s just one of those great mysteries of the universe, not meant to be known.
I just recently happened on a mention of why spammers do this: by posting links to their site, they hope to fool Google into thinking that it’s a popular site. They post them as comments on old entries so you will be less likely to notice and remove them. But the Google spider will see them.
Spammers are still dumb, but there is some method here.
Aha! It’s a googlerank scam!
Step one, surreptitiously insert self-links where nobody will ever see them. Step two, high googleranks.
 
 
 
… Step four, profit!
No, but it does make a sort of sense. I noticed that my googlerank went up after I posted comments on A-List blogs, even though the only links here were from me. It would work for spammers, too, only … I don’t have any more readers at 4 than I did at 2, and they aren’t getting up to 7 by that method. Ah well, they can try.
,
-V.
Also, some journals have a list of latest-posted comments. And yours will too, as soon as I get around to it….