What do the spammers get out of this?

I got some comment spam the other day which really perturbed me. It goes:

Cool site! I’ll be back. substances that cure you: http://www.adobe.com , think that will make relief , thins that excited you at 14

What confuses me is that these links are all to valid, large-scale commercial sites. I really can’t figure out why a spammer would be flooding blogs with links to sites like these, unless they’re being paid to do it. But I have a very hard time believing that Adobe, Yahoo, and Altavista are all taking the legal risk of shelling out cash for blog spam.

Posted in Tech on November 4th, 2005.

One response to “What do the spammers get out of this?”

  1. Glyph Lefkowitz said on November 11th, 2005 at 11:19 pm

    I suspect that there is an automated tool which has a configuration file that has several URLs in it, and the defaults are major sites.

    Spammers are not bright people. One probably just ran the thing without knowing how the configuration format worked, and the default URLs got spammed to a few hundred thousand blogs (yours included).

    Or, possibly the author of such a tool is testing it, and doesn’t want to be traced easily.

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