Proof That I Am Gullible

I recently posted about my blog's readability when I encountered a tool that purported to do this analysis.

I just went to see how it was faring. It got worse. Maybe I should just embrace it. I need to embrace it if I am going to use words like "purported":



So then I got curious about how this worked, where it came from, who did it, and all of that. Google quickly led me to this story about how this tool is just a scam to gain page ranking.

The good news is that I have the sense (and ability) to read HTML snippets before I paste them in my blog. So I trimmed out all of the silly bits. The bad news is that I posted the thing even though I knew it had silly bits. Shame on me. And I just did it again. Just there above. Shame on me again. This time I did remove all links, but when I posted it the first time I left the link back to the test live so that other people could play with it.

And therein lies the genius of the thing. It is a page ranking virus (for criticsrant.com) and I caught it. But then all of these link gadgets are viruses. They are soooo tempting.

The geniuses that read this blog may be interested to know that the actual generated HTML that I got does not contain references to cashadvance1500.com as stated in the article. Here is the actual text:

<a href="http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx"><img style="border: none;" src="http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/readinglevel/img/genius.jpg" alt="blog readability test" /></a><p><small><a href="http://www.criticsrant.com">Movie Reviews</a></small></p>

I can no longer remember what I trimmed out the first time.

Google reports right now that there are 10,800 pages that link to "http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx". Nice virus.

David