Web Detritus

Exactly---they're like spambots that use specific words and phrases to get their Google page ranking elevated. At least that's my theory.

When you get this sort of thing in email, it's called "Bayesian Poison", as it attempts to degrade the ability of spam filters to separate wheat from chaff by making everything sort of - whaff. It's a little harder to figure out what they're thinking on a web page, unless it's just a kind of peeing in the pool impulse. Who wins if search engines don't work? The yellow pages people?

Suppose someone googles "Kyle Gann on Music", and winds up with the blogroll site. Perhaps he will notice the links to 'Bianca Beauchamp Nude' and 'Lip Gloss' on the right hand side, and perhaps his baser instincts (or his chapped lips) will get the better of him. If so, the page has functioned as a crude form of advertising, no?

KG replies: Yeah, but I clicked on 'Bianca Beauchamp Nude,' and it was just another nonsense site. Imagine my disappointment.

They are for search engine optimization. The text is probably farmed from other blogs, and put together in a way that makes it look like a real site, and then links are placed in the "article."



The links point to other sites with the keywords people would search for, for those sites. The links supposedly help those sites get a higher ranking in Google, but as I bet you can infer, Google and other search engines do not like this practice and it is a bad way of getting rankings on the search engines!

KG replies: Thanks for the reasonable explanation. I wonder if that makes my blog rank higher than it should. It would explain a lot.