An unintentionally funny piece of compliment spam I just saw in our spam filter:
last Friday I’ve just enter to search horny sluts and get your The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Is Sex More Likely To Be Emotionally Traumatizing for 17-Year-Old Boys or Girls? post as a result! That’s what exactly what I need! God bless Internet:)
If it weren’t for the badly broken English, and the clearly spammy commenter URL, I would think that this was a pretty amusing parody. Wait, maybe it’s just very deep parody.
I should also say that I feel sorry for anyone who does search for “horny sluts” and then is cruelly deceived into following a link to this blog. Boy, must he be disappointed.
David Nieporent says:
Not necessarily; I’ve heard some pretty wild things about John Bingham...
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November 27, 2009, 6:39 pmCrunchy Frog says:
Does this count wrt the drinking game?
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November 27, 2009, 7:04 pmO-G says:
well they’ve gotta learn sometime, there are no women on the internet.
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November 27, 2009, 7:11 pmCliff says:
It doesn’t seem to work. I think he’s lying.
None-the-less, it’s an amusing lie.
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November 27, 2009, 7:15 pmJavert says:
Who says law profs don’t know how to drive traffic to their blog?
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November 27, 2009, 7:41 pmAppalled says:
I came for the horny sluts, but I stayed for the lengthy grammar lessons.
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November 27, 2009, 7:44 pmjbarntt says:
I bet you did !
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November 27, 2009, 7:50 pmtdsj says:
God bless internet. Indeed.
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November 27, 2009, 8:17 pmzuch says:
Why is this (“Unintentional”) “Robo-Humor”?
Not complaining, jez askin’....
Cheers,
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November 27, 2009, 9:09 pmjimM47 says:
Volokh Conspiracy is currently the number one hit on google for the search “Horny Sluts Law Blog.” (american-style period placement)
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November 27, 2009, 9:10 pmzuch says:
Say, BTW, Prof. Volokh: Could it have something to do with the keywords you have embedded in the site’s HTML (such as, e.g., “for”, “a”, “good”, “time”, “horny”, “sluts”, and “here”)? ;-)
After all, keywords are invisible to the casual user not perusing the source HTML, and don’t have to bear any relationship to the actual page content....
Cheers,
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November 27, 2009, 9:18 pmneurodoc says:
There must be a reason for this sort of spam, but I’m sure I don’t know what it could be. Can someone explain what the spammer achieves through such nonsense? Not selling Viagra, not phishing, not a self-evident scam offer, not anything obvious, at least not obvious to me. So what’s it about? And if this sort of thing isn’t intercepted by one’s spam filter, what harm is done other than clutter?
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November 27, 2009, 9:46 pmBleepless says:
You mean horny sluts have no rights?
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November 27, 2009, 10:31 pmDaniel says:
I think you’ve seriously underestimated the erotic cachet of property law.
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November 27, 2009, 10:39 pmFub says:
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, also known as Gaming Google for search ratings.
The algorithm that determines which search results to display at the top of the results page involves how many sites link to the result site. Comment spam has links to a site that the spammer wants to elevate in search engine result displays.
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November 27, 2009, 11:01 pmkrs says:
Just really vehement sarcasm. “God bless Internet:)” indeed.
Obviously.
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November 27, 2009, 11:07 pmCornellian says:
Boy, must he be disappointed.
In this case, the use of the male pronoun is not entirely a function of grammar.
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November 27, 2009, 11:52 pmtheobromophile says:
There are women on the internet and even at the VC; we just aren’t horny sluts, though.
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November 28, 2009, 12:23 amOff Kilter says:
So you claim, theobromophile, but I note you appended a really hot picture...
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November 28, 2009, 12:36 amPeteP says:
It begs the lead line ‘What’s the difference between a bunch of law professors and some horny sluts ?’ :-)
( you may each now invent and enjoy your own response lines )
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November 28, 2009, 2:03 amJavert says:
Easy versus hard?
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November 28, 2009, 9:52 amASlyJD says:
You have to pay law professors to screw you?
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November 28, 2009, 10:12 amFub says:
I think that difference was starkly illustrated in a parable on contract formation I heard aeons ago. It involved a slightly drunken conversation between a lawyer and a woman of a certain profession in a tavern. I won’t bore you with the story, but the punchline was “Paint my house!”
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November 28, 2009, 11:12 amFedya says:
So you’re all frigid *****es? :-p
[/sarcasm]
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November 28, 2009, 12:58 pmneurodoc says:
Yes, I imagine that is what it is about in the end, but I still wonder how it works. The scammers’ computers go looking for something to glom on to, and the title of EV’s prior thread (“Is Sex More Likely To Be Emotionally Traumatizing”) did it? Then their computers pluck some buzz words (e.g., “sex”) from the thread and generate a pretty nonsensical reply with incorporating those buzz words? That nonsensical reply has to picque recipients’ curiosity enough for them to click on a link to see what is there, and if they do, then the spammers purpose of generating traffic for their site is accomplished? It seems a bit like setting thousands of monkeys to work typing to see whether they will produce anything like Shakespeare, or anything of any value. But it works for the spammers?
I don’t imagine that too many people pay to buy counterfeit Viagra online or fall into the clutches of Nigerian fraudsters, but when they do, not insubstantial sums go into the crooks’ pockets. How much gain can there be in driving a bit of traffic to a dubious website? How much are the extra clicks worth? (Yes, I know there are people in China paid to click away all day to drive up the number of visits, but that is directed, not blind, more or less random activity.)
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November 28, 2009, 1:49 pmNickM says:
neurodoc — the purpose of the comment spam is to create a link recognized by Google’s spiders from a high PageRank site to the spammer’s site. This, especially when they comment spam a large number of sites, boosts the PageRank of their site, thus placing it closer to the top of search results for its key words.
They plan on it being more than just a bit of traffic added in.
Nick
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November 28, 2009, 3:33 pmFub says:
That’s incidental to the purpose of most comment spam, though it can be a bonus for the spammer.
Spammers place links to (call it) spammersite.com on pages served by Volokh.com (and on the zillions of other sites the spammer hits). These links may coincidentally bring in some clicks from readers of the infested sites. But their main purpose is to fool search engines (like Google) that constantly spider the intarweb to build databases.
The search engines use their own proprietary algorithms to determine which websites are more worthy of top placement in their search result displays. These algorithms are commonly believed to include considerations such as the number of websites that link to a given website. So if spammersite.com is linked by a larger number of websites, so the spammer’s reasoning goes, it will get a higher rank in search engines’ result displays.
No “clicks” from users browsing the infested website are necessary. The spammer hopes to generate traffic by appearing near the top of search results.
The actual text (distinct from the embedded link) that the comment spammer generates may be incidentally for purposes of attracting “clicks”, but it is also camouflage to avoid detection and deletion by the infested website owner, directly or through some automated anti-spam filter/scanner. That latter camouflage purpose is why comment spam sometimes contains random strings of words that occurred in other places on the page.
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November 28, 2009, 3:44 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Unintentional Robo-Humor -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Traffic Machine, Eugene Volokh. Eugene Volokh said: Unintentional Robo-Humor: An unintentionally funny piece of compliment spam I just saw in our spam filter: last.. http://bit.ly/81kWuw [...]
neurodoc says:
Thanks, NickM and Fub for those helpful explanations.
The VC’s spam filter blocked the “compliment spam,” but some must get through and accomplish the spammer’s purpose. Any idea how much their efforts can net them? More than what those who spam me with the Viagra crap can expect? Higher Google or other search engine placement for a website holds the prospect of more paying customers for the website or more in ad revenues, or possibly both?
I don’t understand the “Tweets that mention...” stuff, but I’ll save that question for another time. Again, thanks for the enlightenment about the cyberspace “underworld.”
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November 29, 2009, 2:18 amtheobromophile says:
Neither one gets paid as much as they could for services rendered.
I’m just holding out for Easterbrook.
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December 11, 2009, 8:46 pmThe Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Such Nice Readers We Have says:
[...] I noticed that some other blogs prominently post favorable reviews of the blog (much like blurbs on a book jacket), so I thought I’d post a few nice words from our readers: [...]
Mathilda Mcclaugherty says:
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January 26, 2010, 3:33 am