Heads up - new scam ?

**D* G* <d*@kos.net>**

I'm smelling something really fishy here and I thought I'd pass it  
along.  I got a note on my blog from  
firststepgardening.blogspot.com    indicating that they had put a link  
onto my site and asking would I give them a link back.

When I went to the site, (all in Japanese) there were a significant  
number of outbound links *to* other sites including two to mine.

Being suspicious, I ran the page through Babelfish translation and it  
came out very incoherent.  This may be a function of Babelfish or it  
might be because the text is machine generated (it surely resembles  
that kind of text).  There are no other links on the site other than  
the main list on the bottom of each page.  I  ran several pages  
through Babelfish and got the same result.

One other bothersome item was the subtitle on the header - written in  
English resembling a keyword combination.

I've seen a few other fishing expeditions lately where sites are set  
up - ostensibly in good faith and then transformed after incoming  
links are generated into something quite different.  Because automatic  
software is in an ongoing war, many spammers are resorting to human  
completed forms using teams of submitters to leave the same link.    
Once you recognize one name on a form, you can google that name and  
see the trail they've left behind.   For example, Abe Torkleton is now  
everywhere as this spider tries to penetrate all manner of automatic  
sentry systems. :-)

This is the first one I've seen in a foreign language (I have all  
things Russian banned from my various sites but that's another  
story) :-)   As the old tv line went, "Just be careful out there  
people" when you see requests for outbound links.

Doug

Douglas Green
Online Garden Publishing
Blog:  http://blog.douggreensgarden.com
Home: http://www.simplegiftsfarm.com

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