November 18, 2006

• Increases page ranking of affiliated sites
• Whatever the scam is, it must be along the same lines as the spam emails I receive occasionally. These have garbled, apparently randomly generated phrases in their subject lines, which makes it quite impossible to mistake them for anything that'd be sent to me by a friend, or even by a human. I occasionally peek at their contents; most of them contain *stock tips*. It's kind of like the Nigerian 'all we need is your bank account number' scams... I can't imagine anybody ever falling for it, but I keep getting them, so there must be SOME profit in it...
• Some of stock tips may be from people with a vested interest in driving up the prices of those stocks.
• Wikipedia has some good info on Splogs...
• >>stock tips may be from people with a vested interest Well, yeah, clearly; but do people really buy stock based on the advice of anonymous spammers, received via apparently-partly-machine-generated gobbledygook emails? I guess they do.
• Never underestimate the power of human stupidity Which stock was that? I need a goood investment...
• Thanks, Islander, the wiki article is helpful. But I still don't see the full path of the scam. So a "splog" gets me to view itself by containing false information. Where is the value in that for the owner if there are no ads on the site?
• Isn't it possible to boobytrap a website, placing malware on it which visitors to the site don't realize is being covertly installed on their machines?
• The thing is, you may THINK it'd be no big deal to increase the distance of your ejaculate by 175%, but you only KNOW how big a deal it really is when you actually do so.
• From a Wired article on Splogs. The pay-per-click advertising that accounts for most of Google's income (and, increasingly, for the incomes of Yahoo and MSN Search, the two other big search engines) has become an irresistible magnet for hucksters, con artists, and chiselers. "The three main search engines are gateways to a huge percentage of the US and world economy," says Anil Dash, a vice president of the blog-hosting company Six Apart. "If your Web site appears high up on their results, thousands or millions of people will go to it." If even a small fraction of those people click on the ads on that site, "you're going to make a lot of money" – and sploggers are going after it. Because the ad money is effectively available only to Web sites that appear in the first page or two of search results, spammers devote enormous efforts to gaming Google, Yahoo, and their ilk. Search engines rank Web sites in large part by counting the number of other sites that link to them, assigning higher placement in results to sites popular enough to be referred to by many others. To mimic this popularity, spammers create bogus networks of interconnected sites called link farms. Blogs – most of which are in essence little more than collections of links with commentary – are particularly useful elements in them. The result, Dash says, "is what you'd expect: The blogosphere is increasingly polluted by spam."
• Lets say you have a blog. And on that blog you happened to mention a fetish a few times here and there. Google picks you up and suddenly you're getting a few thousand extra visits a day from people looking for said fetish. What's the best way for a person to profit from this wayward googistic perverted crowd?

• most of them contain *stock tips*. It's kind of like the Nigerian 'all we need is your bank account number' scams... I can't imagine anybody ever falling for it, but I keep getting them, so there must be SOME profit in it...

  i sometimes watch stocks that have been pumped in spam. there's generally a fairly strong increase in activity around the time the spam is going out (seems to last a week or maybe two). if you're in a position to move money into and quickly out of the stock, there's money to be made. it's quite risky, of course.