INTERVIEW WITH THE SPAMMER

If you run a moderately popular website, and Blog P.I. is more moderate than most, sometimes you'll get e-mail invitations to link to spammish websites by well-meaning self-promoters bordering on outright spam. Sometimes, not so well-meaning.

I'm not sure which best describes the following, but herewith is a series of three e-mails between myself and an egregious practicioner of this dismaying trend. His name and website redacted:

Hi there,

I am writing about the page http://www.blogpi.net/category/john-mccain/ on your website. I would like to exchange links with that page from the following article on my site:

[REDACTED]

Once you post a link to my site, you can click on the following link to automatically add a link on [his website] to your site. If your email client won't let you open that link, you can paste the article above on your browser and click on the "exchange link" option at the bottom of the page. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reply to this email.

I checked out his website, and the content looked suspiciously like the style of a very prominent website very well-known as one from which spammers like to steal content. I checked, confirmed my suspicion, and replied:

Possibly if you had done something besides copy the text from McCain's Wikipedia entry and throw some Google Adsense ads in the sidebar, I might have been interested.

A day later, to my surprise, he got back to me:

Thanks for your consideration William. It is true the John McCain's article is just the wikipedia content... however that's a starting point and I plan on adding original content as the contest progresses. The lead in to the election page is original content.

If you wish to reconsider, this would be beneficial to both our sites.

Contest? If I'm not at least entered in the Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes, I'm not interested.

Still, that's awful polite of him. Because he took the time to reply, I hesitate to relegate him to the "not so" category. But stealing content from Wikipedia and expecting others to be interested isn't especially ingratiating. And add to it the fact that the name he signed the second e-mail with ("Phil") did not match the name on the account ("Mark") and I suppose a spammer he must be.

Thanks for the interest, Phil/Mark. I don't care to embarrass you publicly, but I won't help you inflate your PageRank, either.

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posted by WWB at 7:23 PM |