My Technorati link cosmos just flashed up with a new blog linking to the Ranter (I have it as an RSS feed into a Firefox live bookmark). Eagerly I clicked on the newcomer – and found an odd, poorly designed thingy with repeated posts about “gift cards”. Not posts with information in them really, but lots of links to the same site and the words gift cards over and over again. It was pretty clear that we were dealing with a fake blog, a phenomenon in the science of spamming that has emerged this year. Informed bloggers hold that the point is to drive another site up the Google page rankings, exploiting Google’s tendency to rate blogs highly. Simply, the idea is to get as many links to the roboblog as possible to boost the value of the links into your real site in Google’s eyes.
I refuse to aid this nonsense by linking to it, so if you want to see it, go to Technorati and search for my URL. I assume it’ll be under “gift cards”. Whois returns the fact that the registrant is hiding behind a firm called “Domains by Proxy Inc” in Scottsdale, Arizona. Feckin’ spammers. On the same theme, I found an odd item of comment spam in my June archives today – among the online poker links was one to www.valeofglamorganconservatives.org, which turns out (deeply to my disappointment) to be an online poker site registered by a firm called Phetermine Deals, who also spam. The chap responsible appears to be one Ron Miles, of English Harbour, Antigua, who gives the phone number (00)268 4606129 as well as his blatantly silly PO box number. The tech contact is in Paris at 38, rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, a well-known source of spam. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I was the Tories’ sysadmin I’d make good and goddamn sure that none of my local groups let their domain names lapse. This sort of thing is embarrassing.