Spam Recipes in GMail

The GMail web app is supported by “featured content” – a sneaky way of saying text link ads – at the top of every page. Among the more interesting ads are those in the spam folder: they are all links to recipes that have spam (the food, not the emails) as an ingredient. There don’t seem to be very many spam recipes on the internet, however. The only four I am seeing:

• Spam Skillet Casserole – Broil until golden
• Savory Spam Crescents – Bake 12-15 minutes or until golden brown
• Vineyard Spam Salad – Combine grapes, spam, peapods and onions in large bowl
• Spicy Spam Kabobs – Serve with hot cooked rice

Oh, those spam ping-bots!

Not long ago, Raymond Chen blogged about those spam pingback-bots:

Last December, some people started to get annoyed by the pingback-bots, and others were confused by them. What’s the deal with those pingback-bots?

It’s all about fooling the search engines in order to make money, taking advantage of friendly policies at domain registrars to make it less costly an undertaking.

Step one: Register a bunch of domains with a domain registrar that includes a money-back guarantee.

Step two: Set up fake blogs on each of those sites, with different keywords.

Step three: Use a script to search the blogosphere for articles that contain keywords that match your site. (There appears to be a single script that 90% of the spam blogs use, since they all look exactly the same, and have the same bugs!)

Step four: Create a bogus blog entry for each one that say something like “Hey, here’s something interesting I found on the Internet” and then reprints the article in question. (You may notice that many of these sites mis-attribute the authorship; some of them even claim to have written the article themselves!)

Step five: Host ads on the site.

Step six: Just before the money-back guarantee period expires, look at each of your fake blogs to see which ones have made money from the ads and which ones haven’t. Cancel the domain registrations of the ones that didn’t make money.

Well, yesterday morning I logged into my wordpress admin dashboard and saw that I, too, had been attacked by a spam ping-bot. The website: a fake hair cair blog. Wait: a hair care blog!? Yes, they linked to my Recommended Listening post of last week. What does hair care have to do with classical music? Well, the title of the song I was reccommending in the post was The Girl with the Flaxen Hair. That might explain that bit.

This is where the story takes a turn for the worse. I should have blogged about it yesterday, but no, I put it off until today – and what do you know, the blog has gone out of style, as Raymond predicts:

Most of these sites are in existence for only a few days, so trying to stop each individual site is a waste of effort; the site is going away soon anyway.

The moral of the story: Don’t procrastinate.

Thoughts: I love Akismet

So far, Akismet (WordPress’s spam filter) has caught 888 spam messages. Compare that to 8 legitimate comments so far on this blog (3 of which were pingbacks, and two of which I wrote.)