A Farce Performance: Honor a Request to Remove Old Blog Comment Spam?

Believe it or not, web kids, there was a time when you could put a form on a web site with a text area and not worry about people blitzing it with spurious irrelevant links to Chinese metal manufacturing companies, porn, pharmaceutical supplies, etc.

What Google provided us in search results rests upon an economic ecosystem of desperate efforts to increase result placement. They are the prime incentive for a spam industry.

As of a few minutes ago, Akismet has saved me from looking at a shade under 3.5 million bogus comments.

Thank you, Akismet. That’s a staggering amount of poop for one blog out on the long tail of the web.

So after having three and one half millions attempts to shove unwanted stuff on my blog, imagine my eyebrow raise when someone wants to take theirs back.

Seriously.

Dear Sir Levine,

The requirements of search engines on e-commerce businesses is increasing and in order to continue to satisfy these requirements we currently control all links which reference us. Links are an important indication of the relevance of a website for search engines such as Google and for this reason the search engine endeavours to check whether a link is placed as a real recommendation or not.

As part of our review we noticed the following domain:
http://cogdogblog.com/

Of course we are delighted by every recommendation and mention on the internet, however we equally endeavour to delete links which do not meet our standard in accordance with the requirements.

Unfortunately thereby there have also been some cases where we ask for links which were meant as a real recommendation to be deleted. Should our request for deletion seem unclear to you we would like to apologise for any inconvenience.

We would ask you to delete all links on your website which reference us, CASAMUNDO, and then give us briefly notify us.

Some exemplary links that we have are in the following list:
http://cogdogblog.com/2006/01/17/some-zing-in-podzinger/comment-page-1/

Thanks for your assistance.

What links “do not meet our standard in accordance with the requirements?”

This, from a blog post more than ten years old. A blog post about a technology and a company that no longer exist (except in the Internet Archive, bless the Internet Archive), that was re-branded a year later by a company that no longer exists.

Did I ever blog a link to CASAMUNDO?

Nope.

It wasn’t me.

The link was in a comment spam, in the paleo-blog era, when spam was a weird oddity and not an all out nuclear war.

Now I do not know 100% sure, but a comment from someone supposedly named CASAMUNDO, with a comment bearing no direct relevance to my post, but with a link to a CASAMUNDO web site… sure smells like crusty old spam to me that Casamundo commissioned to some SEO “expert” to improve their search strandings.

And 10 years later, they are attempting to “control all links which reference us”?

F*** that. Someone at Casamundo thought it was a good strategy 10 years ago to spam my blog, let them live with the crummy link they posted.

I cannot do anything to even put a dent in the onslaught of spam, but this is a thing I can do. This is my blog, and if I want to leave a link to them on my site, I will.

This is CASACOGDOG, it is mine, and you will just have to slough off all the bad SEO my 10 year old blog post is giving you. Suck it.

In other words…

EXPLETIVE DELETED No.

Featured / Top Image: This is the very first result searching Google Images (filtered by license to reuse) on “farce” — Honoré Daumier [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Google can be perfect in it’s results. I could not dream of a more perfectly bizarre image.

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