Tetherd Cow Ahead

I thought it might be time to look once again at the kinds of searches that bring people to The Cow. I am relieved to see that there is something of a de-emphasis of the ‘gay penis’ searches, and interested to observe that ‘famous mirrors’ is still in the top ten, along with ‘shoo tag scam’. We’re also seeing some visits by people skeptical of the ridiculous ‘Trinfinity 8’ (hi there!), which is encouraging, and quite a few who have not bookmarked The Cow and need to keep looking it up on Google. Silly people. You should not only have it bookmarked, it should be on a key macro.

I hope you’re all having a nice day.

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With many many thanks to Atlas, who spends far too much time making me laugh.

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Cow Housekeeping: I have installed a plugin that will allow you to subscribe to all NEW Cow posts as they occur. You’ve been able to subscribe to comments for a while, but theoretically you should now be advised when ever the Cow speaks new thoughts. Just click on the Subscribe button over to the right in the side bar and fill in your email details. You can unsubscribe at any time, should you ever crazily decide to do that.

That is all. We now return you to normal service.

The more observant among you – OK, everyone, I guess, since Malach isn’t visiting anymore – will have noticed the new Twitter feed to the right there. Yes, I have succumbed. Well, for a while anyway, until I get sick of it. But I’ll try to keep it entertaining, so those of you who are in the Twitterati, please link up to Follow.

I’m also hoping that new ideas and fun will pop out of the Twittersphere, and that it will make the Cow experience a little more interactive. So if you want the Cow to scrutinize anything in more detail – tweet me!

Ah, no my Faithful Acowlytes! Not another post about robots, but instead a small piece of Cow Blog Tech. For reasons that are complicated and boring, I have had to make a substantial change behind the scenes here at Cow Central. It’s done now, and hopefully you will have noticed nothing at all.

BUT.

If you have at anytime made direct links to a picture here on The Cow, or to media such as movies or sounds, they will now be broken. I apologize if you find this to be the case. If it’s something you really want to reinstate, email me and I’ll give you the appropriate deets.

We now resume normal transmission.

I really love a good mystery! In my last post Desperate? I talked about the apparent spamming of my (and others’) blog comments by Microsoft. Cow reader Damned Skeptic took me to task about this conclusion, and I defended my logic in the Comments of that post.

In a nutshell, what I said was that given that 99.9% of all the comment spam I get is about link hoarding, what evidence is there that the Bing (and also Yahoo) links were not cut from the same cloth? To me it looks like someone is trying to get some link action happening for those sites.

Except…

This morning I was inundated with a whole lot of spam such as this one from ‘Datherine’:

Here’s where Datherine is linking:

Now, is that not totally bizarre? Firstly, I will acquiesce: it’s fairly conclusive evidence that my first hypothesis was incorrect. I doubt that ALL the search engines are attempting to up their ranking like this. That would just be ridiculous. But what IS going on, then?

One thing that I can tell you is that Akismet (my spam filter) is on top of this – look at the stuff that was scooped up overnight:

There were dozens like this. These, of course, are all generated by bots and are easy to screen, unlike the spumans I mentioned yesterday. But look at those links! Way to add some pile carpet to the noise floor. Why would anyone want to generate lots of links to just any search engine? What are we seeing here? Are the big search engines involved in some kind of clandestine link deluge war? Is there any relevance in the fact that all the attempted links from yesterday and the day before were exclusively Bing and Yahoo, and this morning, for the first time, it’s Google? Wow.

Another thing I can tell you is that this spam was targeting my most visited pages, such as the FAQ, the Rasputin contests and some of my Peter Popoff posts. There is definitely some method behind this madness…