I never mind people reading this blog, but lately I’ve been getting a little antsy over some of the sites that seem to be sending people here. Over the past few days, a motley assortment of spammy-looking pages have been showing up as referers in my stats.

As you can see in the screen grab I took Tuesday morning, most seem to reside at domain names that suggest some sort of substance. But when I’ve clicked through I’ve found nothing but a list of search links, in some cases categorized and in other cases pretty much random. And the searches that I can see in some of those referring links–today, for example, “star hotel roma” and “blog for make money online”–have little to nothing to do with what I write about here.

Spam happens because people think that it will help them make money online. But just what kind of business model am I looking at here? The only way I can see the spammers profiting from sending people to my site is if they’ve got a business connection to a WordAds advertiser, but the ads I see have almost always been from name-brand companies–this program is deliberately limited to “high-quality,” national advertisers. So what’s the deal? If you have a theory, I’d like to read about it in the comments.