A million monkeys writing blog posts
This is kind of funny and sad at the same time. I generally check out my trackback links to make sure they're real sites, if they're not I delete them. One thing I've noticed happening in the past month or so is that there are
made for Adsense sites tracking back that seem to be completely generated text. And they kind of form complete sentences, although trying to read them hurts my head. But they have actually gotten to the point where I have to spend a few seconds scanning the page to figure out if it's a spam page or just a terrible writer. For example, here's the first paragraph from one I just had to delete this morning (no link, for obvious reasons):
Until this date, access to HESSI data will remain restricted. Farm Business and Household Survey DataData Archive: Level 0 data files The data archive will be closed until February 27th, 2002. Profiles of America . The past participle of "to give" has been used for millennia, in the sense of a statementThis site features GIS mapping software, map Web services, online mapping and GIS training, demos, data, product and service information, support, user scripts, and much more.Food Consumption Database.
Clear as mud, huh? It almost looks like somebody wrote a program to go grab random sentences from around the Web and munge them into one post. If they spent some time refining this and running it off of a focused search result, it could be near impossible to tell the difference between an automated post and a terrible writer. I think it's going to get more difficult to combat this stuff unless we start moving towards a decentralized blacklist.



