I dunno... it feels like the same approach as those people who tell you gleeful stories of how they kept a phone spammer on a call for 45 minutes: "That'll teach 'em, ha ha!" Do these types of techniques really work? I’m not convinced.

Also, inserting hidden or misleading links is specifically a no-no for Google Search [0], who have this to say: We detect policy-violating practices both through automated systems and, as needed, human review that can result in a manual action. Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.

So you may well end up doing more damage to your own site than to the bots by using dodgy links in this manner.

[0]https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...

>I dunno... it feels like the same approach as those people who tell you gleeful stories of how they kept a phone spammer on a call for 45 minutes: "That'll teach 'em, ha ha!" Do these types of techniques really work? I’m not convinced

If you are automating it, I don't see why not. Kitboga, a you-tuber kept scam callers in AI call-center loops tying up there resources so they cant use them on unsuspecting victims.[0]

That's a guerilla tactic, similar in warfare, when you steal resources from an enemy, you get stronger and they get weaker, its pretty effective.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDpo_o7dR8c

> gleeful stories of how they kept a phone spammer on a call for 45 minutes: "That'll teach 'em, ha ha!" Do these types of techniques really work? I’m not convinced.

It’s one of the best time investments I’ve ever made. They just don’t call me anymore.

I think they have two lists: the “do not call” list, and the “unprofitable to call” list. You want to be on the latter list.

> it feels like the same approach as those people who tell you gleeful stories of how they kept a phone spammer on a call for 45 minutes: "That'll teach 'em, ha ha!" Do these types of techniques really work? I’m not convinced.

In 2000s there was some company in Russia selling English courses. It spammed so much, that people were really pissed off. To make long story short, the company disappeared from a public space when Golden Telecom joined the party of retaliatory "spam" calls and make computer to call the company using Golden Telecom modem pool.

So, yeah, you kinda can achieve something in this way, but to make sure you should lease a modem pool for that.

One would assume legit spiders obey robots.txt.

I really don't get it. Wouldn't you be wasting a lot of resources feeding the bots like this?

Also, inserting hidden or misleading links is specifically a no-no for Google Search [0]

Depending on your goals, this may be a pro or a con. I, personally, would like to see a return of "small web" human-centric communities. If there were tools that include anti-scraping, anti-Google (and other large search crawlers) as well as a small web search index for humans to find these sites, this idea becomes a real possibility.

yes it work.

phone scammers have a very high personel cost, hence why some resort for human traffic.

if everyone picked up the phone and wasted a few seconds, it would be enough to make their whole enterprise worthless. but since most people who would not fail shutdown right away, they have the best ROI of any industry. they don't even pay the call for first seconds.

> I’m not convinced.

Is this how low we've sunk - that even below taking a single personal anecdote and generalizing it to everything - now we're taking zero experience and dismissing things based on vibes?

I've seen lots of LLM-slop-lovers doing the same thing. Maybe it's a pattern.

Who TF cares about google? This is mostly for personal tech stuff (just the stuff AI steals for training). Id say its pretty welcome that it is not shown in google results.