March 25th, 2005
This Website
#611
Twenty thousand
Tonight is a special night: I hereby commemorate the 20,000th comment ever posted at Minh’s Notes or its sole translation, Apuntes de Minh. And would you guess, it’s spam. Something about getting invited to play a popular card game, run by those Texans down south. They were link-happy about it, too. Texans Hold On, is it? Whatever. ;^)
In fact, only 303 legitimate comments have ever been posted here. That says something about the State of the Web these days. And if it weren’t bad enough, I’m now getting plenty of TrackBack pingspam, too. (TrackBack is the system whereby blog entries automagically link to other blogs that mention it.)
Worse, these spam pings show up on this blog automatically, because Movable Type doesn’t force me to approve pings first, like it does with comments. So I get links to stuff about – shall we say – inappropriate videoclips of non-sentient living creatures procreating on my blog everyday. You just have to find the right entries. (They post on random entries, so that I theoretically can’t find them. Old hat.)
Why do they go through so much trouble? It’s not as though they think humans need to read these comments over and over again. This is a highly obnoxious form of “Googlebombing.” Basically, in order for Google to decide which pages should be displayed above others in its results, it determines how many (and which type of) websites link to it. So spammers try to find every which way to get a website to link to them. I’ve discussed how this pertains to my site before.
Ironically, they – I’m personifying the spambots here – keep on spamming my poor little site, even though it’s not to their advantage. Following Google’s introduction of the rel="nofollow" attribute, which tells Google et al. not to even consider a particular link, I started putting the attribute on every little piece of TrackBack matter I could get my hands on – automatically.
So all the comment spam doesn’t ever see the light of day. And the TrackBack spam that does appear on the site gets ignored by the major search engines that these spammers so crave. In the end, it’s poetic justice: I’m wasting their bandwidth, just as I’m wasting your electronic breath explaining this to you. Sure, my actions here are a drop in the bucket for them, but hopefully I’m not alone in my bitter distaste for all things Holdem.
Show me some love! Post a real comment!
3/26/2005 @ 9:24 PM
John
I just laugh at how many people are getting screwed by this fad, I hear some people are in for over $100 at st.x.
3/27/2005 @ 5:49 PM
Minh Nguyễn
Wanna help come up with a 12-step program for Texans Anonymous?
;^)