I was looking through my MetaFilter profile – seeing which posts and comments of others that I've favourited and who has favourited posts and comments of mine.
This led me to realise that someone appears to have paid the $5 lifetime membership to create a MetaFilter account simply to have a profile with a single “Favourite” vote for a post of mine and a link back to their own web site which happens to be about the same topic as the question I asked (“Can you pinpoint the single happiest moment in your life?“)
Presumably they did this in the hopes of driving traffic to their web site but still, was it even worth $5 to do this considering my question, although it got a few “favourite” votes, is by no means a highly visible question that many people will see?
I guess for some people, sure, it's about the cost of a pint of beer and it's a permanent link in a very targeted spot to promote their web site. Plus I know that whenever I post a link to my blog on MetaFilter in relevant discussions (I've done so in a couple library school related threads), I always get a few ongoing hits because of that.
But still, MetaFilter profiles are a bit more buried than the posts and comments that make up the bulk of the web site so seeing this sock puppet/spammy account connected to a post of mine just seemed really strange to me.
Comments 2
I don't want to burst your bubble, but I am betting they paid the money, tried it out, and got bored. That is not exactly an effective SEO technique—metafilter is hardly the top of the Google foodchain, and a single link from a profile page won't rank very high. Then again, buying links is expensive, the going rate for Diggs used to be $1/link, but I am told that it is now $2/link.
No bubble to burst. In fact, my thinking is pretty much similar to yours as to what likely happened. I just found it strange/weird to see this happen in a place where I hadn't seen that before (as you say MetaFilter isn't exactly rolling in link spam – which is one reason I like it so much) connected to one of my posts.