I have a nasty suspicious mind.

I recently received a message about one of the other websites I run, from a woman named Donna. She wanted to let me know how useful she'd found one of my pages for a school project she was doing and to point out that one of the links on the page was broken. She also had a suggestion for a substitute link that I could use in its place. I started to write a polite note thanking her and then stopped, struck by a thought.

What if 'Donna' wasn't entirely disinterested in recommending that link? What if ...

I did a quick Google search. Sure enough, I found another page where 'Donna' — with the same email address and a (slightly) different last name — had written to the curator of another list of resources. This time 'Donna' wasn't working on a school project: she was responsible for finding resources for our online learning center and once again, she'd found a broken link and would like to suggest a replacement. And further on, I found still another webpage with a list of resources, including one that was shown as having been 'contributed' by someone called Donna. Again, the email address was the same, but this time the last name was very different.

So what? Maybe she's just a good Samaritan who likes to help people tidy up broken links. The fact that she uses three different names might not mean anything: maybe she got married, maybe she made a typo. Maybe I'm reading too much into this.

There was something odd about the pages that she recommended, though. In each case, they consisted of a list of links on a specific topic. For example, two of her recommendations were for a page about women in computer science. Oddly, however, that page was hosted on a website belonging to a company that rents audio-visual equipment. Google reports a number of links to that page, each of them from other 'resource list' pages elsewhere on the Internet. But - as far as Google knows - there's no link from the site itself to that page. So how did all those other sites discover this useful page? I suspect that they all got a letter from 'Donna'.

The other page 'Donna' recommends is similar. Again, it lives on a site that has ostensibly nothing to do with the subject matter. The site itself is about 'online education', and appears to be a link farm with affiliate links to various 'online colleges' (all the usual names in the somewhat murky world of private for-profit universities are represented). Again, there's no obvious route from the main pages of the site to this handy list of resources that 'Donna' wanted to share with me (and wanted me to share with others).

As an old friend used to say, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it's enemy action. So it seems that Donna likes to recommend links. She likes to recommend links on a range of topics, and she gives different explanations for her interest each time. And the links that she recommends just happen to be links to pages on commercial websites, pages that have nothing to do with the site itself.

Digging a little deeper, I also came across Mindy, who has an email address at the same domain as Donna (the domain in question has a private registration, by the way). Mindy's name often comes up on web pages containing lists of links, where she gets thanked for suggesting a link. It looks like Mindy and Donna have the same hobby. Amazingly enough, the pages that Mindy recommends also happen to consist of lists of links on topics that have nothing to do with the site where they're hosted.

Finally, one more detail: remember that page of mine that 'Donna' liked so much, the one that had helped her so much with her schoolwork? As it happens, there's not just one broken link: the page hasn't been updated for about ten years and more than half the links on it are now broken. It's odd that she didn't mention that.

It looks very much as if 'Donna' is engaged in some sly page-rank building. The goal is to get other people to link to the sites that she's trying to promote, but she's much too clever to simply ask for a link exchange. Instead, she seeks out sites that already contain lists of links and suggests to the maintainer that they might like to add one of her links - disguising the whole thing as a note of thanks or an error report. To judge by the number of grateful acknowledgements to Donna or Mindy, the scheme seems to be working pretty well.

Timeo Donna et dona ferentes.