Oh Spammer, Where is Thy Sting?

I don't understand spam. Everybody hates it. People spend big money trying to figure out how not to get it. So why bother? I understand that it's a relatively cheap form of advertising. But if the return is zero, it's still too expensive.

I suppose that the return isn't actually zero. For every 100,000 messages they send out, they probably get one hit, and for every 200,000 hits, they make a sale. Which covers their costs.

Still, why go to a lot of trouble to force it down people's throats? Why try to get around their spam filters? If they set up spam filters, they aren't going to buy anything. So leave them alone!

I felt the same way about the National Do Not Call list. The telemarketing companies were against it, but I couldn't see why. The government is compiling a list of people who aren't worth your time. Isn't that great? I wish the government would step in and compile a list of students who aren't going to study, and then we could simply not admit them. But no, the telemarketing companies held out hope that if they could just get through to these people, theirs would be the one offer that the customer decided to pursue.

I bring all this up because my comments have been spammed. I'm set up so that someone comments, I get e-mail. Look through the recent posts, and you'll see that this isn't exactly threatening to bust my inbox. So today I got a comment that said "Looking for information and found it at this great site.. and went on to list a bunch of semi-random words and phrases (ones that I think they expected would be googled fairly often, like "weight loss" and "chicago cub") each with a link. I don't know where the link goes, because I haven't clicked on it.

I thought that I would try to figure out how to erase this blight, but here's the thing: I can't find it. It wasn't added to any of my posts in November. Or October. So they attached it to some post at least two months old. I'm sure they weren't expecting anyone to actually notice it. It's all part of some clever plot to defeat some search engine's algorithm by creating a bunch of phantom links to their site. I'm sure someone out there understands it, but not me.

I still don't get the point. Suppose that this plan works, and their site rises high on the list of sites that Google returns for "chicago cub." So they get people who are trying to find out something about the Cubs, and these people go to their site. Then what happens? They curse and click the back button. Nobody is going to stay and buy something because tricked them into being there. So why do it?