Ad Ki$$ers, Keyword Infesters and Other Spamiliciousness

Spammers are getting crafty. And not in a "Let's Weave Baskets Together Kumbaya" sort of way.

No, this is an "Every Day We're Devising New Methods to Force-Feed Your Quality Blog with Our Virtual Pork Snouts and Hooves and Clog its Arteries Like Those of an Obese Comedian on Big Macs and Speed" sort of way.

My patience is thinning.

The Spam's about to hit the fan.

Yep, these purveyors of processed pig parts are increasingly determined to make their messaging mine, and in any way they can. So instead of using robot messages, which get filtered out, they've found exciting new tricks to give their Spam a more individualized, hand-crafted, personalized touch.

Well, thanks for the thought, Spammers, but I don't take well to other people trying to foist crappy marketing on me, thinking I won't notice. I mean, I'm in marketing. I can add crappy content of my own, thankyouverymuch.

Yesterday, some yahoo who called himself "Phillip" decided my If Top Gear Tested Heelys Shoe Skates post-- in order to be 105% more Spamilicious-- needed the following comment:

"Sneaker Skates by Surfer being sold on ebay size 8"

Oh, really, Phillip? REALLY, PHILLIP?! My GOD, thank you for letting me know!

See, now, months after I'd posted that post which was NOT AT ALL about my need for sneaker skates unless I could get Richard Hammond to wear them, and maybe roll up and down the track for me just a little but that wasn't the point so where was I?...

Oh yes-- months later I see you, Phillip, do a Google search on "shoe skate comments" and decide to inject your little Ebay ad into the fun.

And, you know, the thing that annoyed me even more was-- it doesn't even try to be chatty!

Go take your shoe skates and enjoy a long roll off a short pier, Phillip.

Of course, this is on the heels of my battle with the Keyword Infesters.

These are businesses who-- either through bad SEO advice or by wholly uncaring intent-- have started showing up in the comments section of a blog like a cloud of locusts.

There they leave comments where their usernames are not legit business or blog names. No. They're all SEO keywords to lead to their own blogs when people do Google searches. That means, if left untouched, the comment section gets littered with commentary from "readers" like:

Good Plumbers, MA

Or:

Comfortable Socks

Or:

Electricians in Georgia

Or:

Excellent Quality Shorts

Not only is it extremely irritating to be used so cheaply and blatantly for keyword traffic, but it's impossible to have a rational discussion about anything with someone called Excellent Quality Shorts.

Into the bin with you all! Be gone, Ye Spammy Offenders!

And lastly, while I'm giving my blood pressure meds a nice workout, I want to talk about "Ad Ki$$ers."

People on social networking sites like BlogCatalog are probably well-familiar with these folks.

These are the people who leave you private shout messages telling you that they've "ki$$ed" your ads (meaning, purposefully clicked site sponsor ads with no intent to purchase, thus earning the blogger money but cheating advertisers) and that you should do the same for them.

These folks are the least intelligent of the bunch because they tend to neglect certain details. Like the fact that we have tracking software and can actually see they never visited the blog.

And having not visited the blog, they don't realize some of us actually don't have ads fer ki$$in'.

My response to this has been to report them. But not before I leave them a nice non-private message saying I, unlike them, will not engage in click fraud as they had requested.

Better pucker up those Ad Ki$$ing lips to smooch the rosy rear-end of the Google-meister, Spammers! Because you're going to have to do some serious sucking-up to retain your Adwords privileges.

So, there you have it. The battle is on. The eternal fight of good against evil. White hat versus black hat. Spaminator versus Spammer. Shaun of the Dead versus Umbrella Corporation--

Oh. Sorry. That's a different post.

Be careful out there, folks!


Question: What fun with spammers have you had lately?

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Humorbloggers
Humor-blogs

Separated at Birth?

There are only so many configurations for the human face, what with most of us limited to having just two eyes and one nose, and the general placement of them being fairly restricted unless you're a Picasso.

But every now and then I'm watching TV and still find myself surprised at HOW MUCH someone on there looks like somebody else.

So instead of me making comments about these things to my television set-- which almost NEVER answers back-- I thought I'd post some of my favorite celebrity look-alikes here.

Like how about James Dyson of the Dyson vacuum cleaner commercials...


And Julian Sands, the actor who was in Warlock and Stephen King's Rose Red...?


I always find myself rooting on James Dyson, just because the guy's entire life seems to be about making vacuum cleaner prototypes. He's probably not a lot of fun at parties, but I bet he has a really clean house. And I think having Julian Sands play him in a film version of the Dyson story could be entertaining, because Julian is usually evil. So maybe the vacuum cleaners could turn out to be possessed or something... sort of like Christine, but with more suction and fewer traffic accidents.

Okay, next we have Doctor Who's David Tennant...


And Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond...


Okay, yes, David Tennant is well over six feet tall, and Richard Hammond is about 5 foot seven. But still... (And yep, I do watch a lot of BBC America, why do you ask?)

All righty, how about actor Dax Shepard...



And actor Zach Braff, "Newbie" from Scrubs?...

Not initially knowing Dax Shepard, but watching Scrubs, I admit, I spent a good portion of Zathura trying to figure out why Zach Braff's voice sounded strange.

So what do you think, folks-- am I way off base here? Has there been anyone you think bears a striking resemblance to someone you'd care to share?

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Humor-blogs has no look-alikes. But that's probably because of all the plastic surgery.