Umm, shouldn't the link to the company be set up as rel="nofollow"? Having an inbound link from paulgraham.com has got to boost your pagerank massively.
EDIT: oops, I missed the
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">
tag, which will hopefully take care of it, although I'm not sure about its placement inside a HTML comment. Will that work?
One source we use to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project. You can direct us not to use this as a source by adding a meta tag to your pages.
To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using this information for the page's description, use the following:
Is it actually an attempt to impersonate pg qua pg, or just a random scam sent with a plausible-sounding combination of first and second names? Has it been targeted at founders, or is it just that founders are the only folks likely to forward the email back to pg?
you have to wonder. if these poorly written engrish 419 scams have been successful enough to warrant the flood of them as well as all the media attention, how much damage could one do setting up a truly legitimate sounding one?
More damage, probably. But the thing is one would have to be well schooled in English to write a truly legitimate sounding one, and that would probably mean growing up in an English speaking country. That probably means that you live in an English speaking country (or other developed country) so you hopefully have some better options than being a scamster, and there is probably more local law enforcement to stop you. That's the universe balancing things out - not that I'm defending it at all. All that said, I'm sure some better written scams do exist.
I wonder what the most convincing scams are (the ones for which some HN folks would maybe fall)...
If you've never seen a Contactus, you're missing out. They're really cool. They grow in the badlands of the internet, surviving for weeks without water or human interaction.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. It was particularly odd, as it was mailed from the UK, and I live in Austria. I haven't quite figured out how they managed to get my address, I can only assume that they got it through the public business directory. (my home address is the same as the registered address of my freelance/consulting business, so I can't tell for certain) Why they'd mail me in English then (how do they know I speak it?) I have absolutely no idea.
Sigh...here we go again. You do have to hand it to these people for doing a little bit of research and going as far as to set up a website for their "venture"
Lol, you know you have "geek street cred" when people are using your name to try and con other people. While this kind of sucks, I wish I have your problem someday.
EDIT: oops, I missed the
tag, which will hopefully take care of it, although I'm not sure about its placement inside a HTML comment. Will that work?