What's with this Weird Web of Writing Fragments

May 3, 2005 4:11 PM

What the heck is this thing? Who wrote the stories? Why are some of them about male-cross dressers and some totally not?

Why are they all located in freebie second-level domains? Is it some kind of click traffic farm thing? [I stumbled across it while googling the lyrics of the chorus for a song I would later identify as "Wonderful" by Ja Rule.]

posted by britain to grab bag (3 comments total)

Link farm, IMO. The clues are in the code. The "links" are all on one line, which suggests to me that they were generated by a script.

Tacked on the end, wrapped in a "display: none" tag, are the links that the page is attempting to whore.

The text could come from anywhere - ASSTR, usenet, etc.

It would be nice if your post could be de-link-ified. No sense giving them any more search engine attention.
posted by Leon at 5:33 PM on May 3, 2005

This is interesting.

All the subdomains used are based off of domains offering dynamic DNS services. It seems they're using dynamic DNS services to point the subdomains to regular hosting accounts, which then host these pages. It may be a test of the rumored Google system of allowing subdomains into the index more quickly than regular domain names.

Even the few hidden domains that are actually in Google do not rank for the terms used. Google are good at cracking down on this crap. Interesting to see them using the U tag rather than DIV. Nice evasion tactic :)

I tracked down a lot of the content to coming from this story (obviously not safe for work).
posted by wackybrit at 5:38 PM on May 4, 2005

Thanks, Leon and wackybrit. =)

I hope I didn't drive up the SEO of some nefarious clickfarmer too much.
posted by britain at 5:16 AM on May 6, 2005