I get a fair number of messages inviting me to exchange links with other sites. Most of these are fairly obviously automated, and it's clear that no human has even looked at my web pages. "Dear Xyz2300, I visited your website about kittens, and I think you should really add a link to our website about floor wax." Uh, sure you did.

Some of them are subtler, though. Like this one, which said:

Hello!

My friend's site, ________, is finally up and running. I think a link exchange with _____ would help make it even better. If you are interested in a link exchange send me the url of the page with a link to my page ...

It goes on in the same chatty tone.

As a rule, I don't do link exchanges with anyone. If people want to link to my sites, that's great. If a site is relevant and useful, I'll add it to my link indexes. But I won't play the "I'll link to you if you'll link to me." game.

On the other hand, I'm not such a curmudgeon that I'll automatically add anyone to my database of spammers just because they send me a link-exchange request. I make sure that there's other evidence to suggest that they are indeed spammers running a 'link farm' operation before I add them to my shitlist. So I took a few moments to check out the website that "John Nadler" wanted me to link to.

The page I landed up on contained a blog entry written by someone called Kristin Breheim. It looked fairly above board, but out of curiosity, I googled the name. Wow. Kristin's a busy lady. And knowledgeable too. She's written not just about airbrushing leather jackets, but also about accent lighting, floating beeswax candles, real estate, and wall stencils. Curiously, all of the blogs that she posts to have almost exactly the same look and feel: banner, row of Yahoo! ads down the left, and then the blog entry text on the right.

That's not too strange: not everyone takes the time to customize their blog templates. But Kristin has a co-authoress called Melissa J. Morphew, and what do you know? She's another polymath. Melissa has written blog entries — all on different blogs — about astrology, organic food, waterskiing, airbrushing (again), insect control, the Suzuki Katana motorcycle and event planning, among others.

So we have all these similar-looking blogs filled with entries written by these two busy ladies. Let's do a little more digging: let's try feeding those domain names into WHOIS.

Guess what? About half of them come back as being registered to one "Gough, Brett", in Miami. Others are registered anonymously. But even the anonymously-registered domains are using the same nameservers — at burtonhosting.com — that are used for most of the others.

Melissa and Kristin turn out to have a friend called Desirae Thom who also likes to write about stencils and event planning, but is also an expert on bike racks and bananas. And Desirae has lots more friends who also write on a wide range of topics, but all on suspiciously similar-looking blogs that all turn out to have overlapping registration details.

I think we should all say a big 'thank you' to Brett for providing all those places where his multi-talented lady friends can share their extraordinarily encyclopedic knowledge about everything from stencils to statistics. And whatever he happens to be making from those Yahoo! ads that cling to the sides of these plausible-looking blogs, well, it's no more than he deserves for the time and trouble he spent registering all those domains and customizing all those templates.