Yet another insidious form of spam

One of the hazards of holding the awesome power of reaching handfuls of blog readers every day is that people will try to piggyback on that to deliver their own message, for example by posting a comment plugging their product. I've had that happen twice or so. I suspect it would happen more often if more people read the blog (but don't let that stop you -- it's a risk I'm prepared to take).

This morning, however, I saw a new spin on the scheme. While looking through the traffic statistics, such as they are, I ran across the search string "Our fine product 3.2 will be released on some date." Apparently enough words in that sentence match something somewhere in these pages for it to register as a hit so their bot can click through and get their message onto my statistics. Clever, eh?

First, it gets the message to my eyeballs, in case I want to buy their fine product. Second, since I'm a highly-influential "thought leader" by virtue of writing a blog, I might even find it in my heart to tell my vast audience about their fine product. If only I could remember what it was called and who makes it ...

Of course, it could be that someone really was searching for just those keywords, in which case I apologize for the snarky tone.

But somehow, I doubt it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to google "Sorry, I won't plug your product on my blog".