I just noticed I had a pile of blog spam and went to take a look. Occasionally a legitimate comment gets caught in there and I need to kick it loose. The true spam, with all the indecipherable links for drugs or who knows what, all that junk from foreign countries, gets deleted.
On rare occasions, I find something amusing in there. Like today. The following, from Russia, was appended to my last post about Rand Paul:
There. is not purposes such a rations that could be compared to the potato on its acceptance and demand. Every prime millions of people skit pick to it on their dinner table. So innumerable mouth-watering and suited dishes can be made in of it! After all, potatoes are wonderfully combined with fish, provisions, mushrooms, vegetables and cereals. Boiled and fried, baked and grated, mashed and dried, stewed and stuffed potatoes; it’s on the other dispense an discovery perks in beadroll of their use. Both a soup is more demolished and a salad is more appetizing with them. The potato is justly called the harmed bread stifling to people, its “younger uncut”. There are songs, fairy tales and legends composed around the potato
Say what?
I’ve seen this around many times. There are entire web pages of this crap. I’m pretty sure it’s for the search engine spiders. There are phrases in here designed to get a high ranking on specific pages with specific tags and specific search terms. I’ve suspected for some time that this might actually be part of a larger experiment by some search engine optimization hacks to learn the best techniques for generating the tags on specific pages. They simply spam the internet with their crap and then keep track of it in a database. Then they have a program run automated searches for their terms and see which pages get returned. Sometimes some of the returns are from their spam pages. When this happens, they track the time (giving them the time it took the search engine to spider and update the page) and the rank (giving them a metric for calculating what algorithm is being used to determine the rank).
It’s sort of like shooting at targets in the dark with a shotgun, and then seeing what you get based on the number of holes in the paper. Keep doing it, and eventually you start getting hits. The goal is to be able to calculate the direction to aim in the fewest possible shots.
This one, then, is a bit more camouflaged than most I’ve seen, in that it looks like someone with broken English was trying to write something about cooking with potatoes. Usually the ones I get that are full of search terms and tags are obviously that — long lists of unrelated search terms — “building ocean brick horse television street hamburger rocket verve,” etc. This one actually made sense occasionally.
Yes, and I think this is something that the bots have been programmed to look for. The search engines are getting smarter. If they come across a bunch of nouns with no verbs or conjunctions or particles, they’re beginning to ignore it and flag the content as potential spam. Pretty cool.
Yep, got to admire the intelligence and ingenuity of both sides in the code wars.