OddThinking

A blog for odd things and odd thoughts.

Confusing Spammer Strategy

So, there is this spam web-site, that has grabbed snippets from a number of RSS feeds about Kakuro solvers (including this site), and put them all on one page in the hope of getting some Google juice for a search term.

To squeeze some of my Page Rank, it then attempted to leave some pingback spam, so that I would link to it. (Yes, they got their link successfully, for the 45 minutes it took for me to delete it, but with No Follow tags, so there was no point.)

So far, nothing special.

On their page, was an image they had stolen from me – a partially solved Kakuro. But, they flipped the image left-right. For many images that would not be noticable but for this image, which consisted mainly of numbers, it stood out.

Presumably, this was to stop me automatically detecting that my image had been stolen… but why did they send me a pingback to bring my attention to it?

The site is in the United Arab Emirates, so I suppose a DMCA takedown is out of the question?


Comments

  1. So how did you manage to reclaim? Did you email the site admin or something?

  2. I haven’t bothered. I just assumed that they had found a host that wouldn’t care, and didn’t feel like following it back all the way.

    I deleted the pingback though.

    Talking of spam, I edited your comments to bring the self-promotion down to an acceptable level.

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