More semi-amusing referrer spam

As you may know, I have my awesome computer engineering javascript and CSS resume posted on this site. And actually, I’ve gotten quite a few responses from random companies and people all across the US… which has been really encouraging for me, especially since I haven’t applied anywhere! But onto the amusing referrer spam.

Using OWS, I’ve noticed a lot of random referrer spam to my resume. And, its pretty consistent: each instance points to a (valid) resume for some totally random person. This is one instance:

hostname Date Time Referrer URL User-Agent
65.91.101.XXX 2007-11-02 10:37:26 http://lalaland.msu.edu/ ~vanhoose/resume/resume.html Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; SCF – Mean & Nasty; T312461)
65.91.101.XXX 2007-11-02 10:37:25 http://lalaland.msu.edu/ ~vanhoose/resume/resume.html Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; SCF – Mean & Nasty; T312461)
65.91.101.XXX 2007-11-02 10:37:22 http://www.dalehollowmarketing.com/ Htm%20pages/resume.htm Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt)

Theres been around 10 or 20 of these types of referrer spam URL’s I’ve seen over the last few months. The weird part is that all of the different URL’s are always people of varying experience, and totally different career fields (teachers, businessmen, researchers), and even international students and such. And, theres been a few different IP addresses its originating from.. but who knows with how much adware/botware is out there.

What I can’t imagine is the purpose.. I mean, is someone paying for someone to spam their resume around? Totally untargeted referrer spam like that can’t possibly be effective — I mean look, they caught my attention, but is an HR person really going to look at website logs? Doubtful. And if they did, I’m pretty sure they would NOT hire that person for being so spammy. Maybe the spammers are just picking resumes at random…. but that doesn’t even make sense either! Heh..

Anyways, I really need to refocus my resume in the very near future (like.. this weekend) to a more engineering type of job, since right now it makes it looks like I want a web developer/related job. Which don’t get me wrong, I think I might enjoy a job doing web related stuff, but I think I’m really looking for somewhere I can innovate and contribute as a computer engineer, or something close. I’ll have to write about this soon.. since, the one thing keeping me looking for a job right now is that I’m waiting to see whether I’m accepted into the graduate school I wanted to get into or not. Wish me luck.

2 Responses to “More semi-amusing referrer spam”

  1. nitro2k01 says:

    The only referrer spam I’ve gotten is that from statusrank.com. Not very exciting. 🙁

  2. Ben says:

    Mine came from pool-71-168-74-171.cncdnh.east.verizon.net and claimed to have been referred from another resume for a faculty member at my university (I’m a grad student.)

    Maybe it’s just a resume crawler, and they’re just pasting the URL of the last resume they crawled, instead of just saying “no referrer.” Still odd though.

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