One of the scary, but compelling, bits of having a blog is seeing how people found you. TypePad offer referring addresses which make this very easy, but all it does is make you wonder whether most of the people visiting you are on their way to somewhere else. (It also reveals how well trackback spam works.) Here’s a sampling of the past few hours:
- Google search for ‘gay male sex’ took the hapless user to my Directory of Firewalls (this may have something to do with some nasty trackback spam I hadn’t spotted, but don’t you think the page title would have given the game away? Or does ‘firewall’ mean something different to some people?);
- Some lonely soul in Argentina searching for ‘free horse sex’ found my piece on Yahoo! buying Oddpost (same trackback thing, it turns out);
- Some dissatisfied worker bee looking on Google for ‘how employee revenge company’ may actually have been satisfied to read my post on Spam As Revenge, which wasn’t supposed to be a primer;
- A lot of folk seem to be looking for cracks — serial numbers, or software that’s been tampered with so it will run without a serial number. Sorry, guys, don’t have that kind of thing here.
- One guy — a John Dvorak fan? A classical music lover? Or John himself? — was looking on Google for ‘all praise Dvorak’, and found only my piece on John’s dislike for tags (and A list bloggers);
- Another guy was using Google to find out ‘where to sell porn material’, and found my posting from a couple of years back on the growth of porn (he’s not going to be happy that the title sounds like it was just up his street: News: Wanna Get Rich? Sell Porn. Once again, not intended to be a primer. Good luck on the porn selling, dude.
That said, most of the searches seem to be pretty good matches. Only now I dread to think what kind of search results this posting is going to end up in.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m kinda confused as to what a trackback is/does and how it linked bizzare searches to your blog …
Akshay, as I understand it, what happens is this:
* spammer links to a page on my blog
* this triggers TypePad to create a TrackBack
* TypePad creates a TrackBack entry on my blog, which includes a title and excerpt to the site that is linking to my blog posting
* That title can include a link, or several, which the spammer would use to include links to the sites he’s trying to promote
* The excerpt would include some keywords (“Buy accutane,cheap albuterol” etc)
* These keywords would then start being included on search engines
* Users of search engines looking for these products would see my blog pages appear and visit them
* A side benefit would be folk visiting those pages anyway, and seeing the ‘ads’.
Drivers who run red lights should be punished severly