I think it's all rather sweet
Well, at the moment at least. It could become very annoying.
What am I talking about? Blog Spam.
I've not put the word verification doodad on this blog yet, mostly because I can't read the letters myself half the time, and the other half they spook me by spelling out strange messages telling me to kill my boss or urinate in the vicar's tea.
So far it's not been too bad, opening myself up to all the nastiness of the intarwub. Sir Benfro doesn't get that many hits anyway. But I do get maybe one or two a week which are spam.
It's always easy to spot them, because they appear as comments to very old posts. And since Blogger kindly emails me every comment (sometimes twice), it's easy enough to go in and delete them.
But having a mind irritatingly good at pattern recognition, I've started to see a certain method in the madness that it blog spam. I couldn't quite get my head around the repeated attempts to sell binoculars through my archived witterings, but then I re-read the posts that had been targeted and noticed that I had, indeed, used the word 'binoculars' in one, and 'twitcher' in both.
Lately it's become even more obvious. Earlier this week, I received the following snappy comment:
This genius hadn't even managed to make the link active, so Google's not going to count it as a link back and so up the page ranking, which is why these goons do this, after all. They haven't realised yet that Google doesn't just blindly count the number of links into a site either - it ranks the value of those links by some nefarious method and deducts points for obscure blog entries. It puzzled me for a while why Mr Wellness had targeted my blog and a post written back in January, until I looked at the title of that post:
Die Healthy
Do you see the pattern emerging? Or do I need to go and take my pills again?
What am I talking about? Blog Spam.
I've not put the word verification doodad on this blog yet, mostly because I can't read the letters myself half the time, and the other half they spook me by spelling out strange messages telling me to kill my boss or urinate in the vicar's tea.
So far it's not been too bad, opening myself up to all the nastiness of the intarwub. Sir Benfro doesn't get that many hits anyway. But I do get maybe one or two a week which are spam.
It's always easy to spot them, because they appear as comments to very old posts. And since Blogger kindly emails me every comment (sometimes twice), it's easy enough to go in and delete them.
But having a mind irritatingly good at pattern recognition, I've started to see a certain method in the madness that it blog spam. I couldn't quite get my head around the repeated attempts to sell binoculars through my archived witterings, but then I re-read the posts that had been targeted and noticed that I had, indeed, used the word 'binoculars' in one, and 'twitcher' in both.
Lately it's become even more obvious. Earlier this week, I received the following snappy comment:
Hi! I like what you are doing. Maybe we could exchange tips on the Art of Living. You can have a quick look at http://www.wellnessmaster.com so we can exchange ideas.
This genius hadn't even managed to make the link active, so Google's not going to count it as a link back and so up the page ranking, which is why these goons do this, after all. They haven't realised yet that Google doesn't just blindly count the number of links into a site either - it ranks the value of those links by some nefarious method and deducts points for obscure blog entries. It puzzled me for a while why Mr Wellness had targeted my blog and a post written back in January, until I looked at the title of that post:
Die Healthy
Do you see the pattern emerging? Or do I need to go and take my pills again?
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