How to Spot a Psychopath

I get a lot of link-farm spam, of varying levels of ingenuity.

This one's got a new twist, though.

From: Alicia
[sending server located in some craphole]
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: An Idea/Suggestion for 404 link on http://www.dansdata.com/usbadapt.htm
Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 08:10:42 -0600 (CST)

Hey :-)
I happened to noticed that on the page http://www.dansdata.com/usbadapt.htm you have an outgoing external link to http://www.archive.org/movies/movies.php, however I found that it is a broken link (doesn't look like that page exists anymore or is temporarily down). I found this page to be a good replacement if you just wanted to change the link.
http://www.filmposters.com/articles/evolution-horror-movies.asp
Hopefully this adds another resource to your page if anything.

Hope this is of some help, thought it was a good site to reference. Hope it proves to be useful

Thanks,
Alicia

This really does look like an actual e-mail from a human being, doesn't it?

Of course, a human being would probably have noticed that although the Internet Archive's moving image collection page has moved since I wrote that review in 2004, the old URL redirects to the new one.

A human being might also be able to detect a slight difference in content between the place I was linking to and the place "Alicia" wanted me to link instead.

The Internet Archive moving image collection lets you download, for free, tons of movies that're out of copyright or otherwise free to distribute. Nosferatu, His Girl Friday, Night of the Living Dead, Reefer Madness, old computer TV shows, cartoons, vintage educational films, "ephemeral" films; you name it. It's great.

Filmposters.com, in contrast, is pretty much what you'd expect filmposters.com to be. The page "Alicia" wanted me to link to isn't the usual meaningless link-farm robo-content, though; it's about "The Evolution of Horror Movies", and seems to be a perfectly valid page with real content. But it also seems to not be in the Google database at all, which suggests that it's brand new.

Perhaps the idea behind this spam is to make actual valid content pages on sites that want the PageRank boost that all link schemes are about. Then you scan for broken links on Web sites and shoot off these seemingly-from-a-human e-mails, suggesting people update their link to point to your page.

The only problem is that, as usual, it's all based on software that's trying, unsuccessfully, to find targets that're relevant to the stuff the spammer is trying to advertise.

If this really is the scheme, it's a step forward from normal link-farm sites, which exist only to trick searchers into clicking on ads. But I'm still not going to help "Alicia" do it.