Someone found my post about my legendary Herman-Miller Levity standing desk and added a comment asking about operating manuals for it. When I searched (using DuckDuckGo) for manuals Herman-Miller "Levity standing desk", it returned my post, but also found bogus copies of it on random sites!
I’m not sure why anyone would bother to copy content from my weak endeavor, the 3,000,000th most popular site on the Internet. If you look, the path part of the URL of the fake web pages is herman-miller-cubicle-instruction-manual, so maybe the spammers figured out people are looking for “herman miller instructions,” found my human text, and slapped up copies with a promising URL.
I visited one of these pages (don’t!), and the bastard spammer has badly and mechanically rewritten my page, probably so that search engines don’t detect that it’s a complete ripoff. My text
computers: my legendary Herman-Miller Levity standing desk
For months I tried to give my old adjustable desk to a museum, or at least to someone who has a use for it. It’s the Levity by Herman-Miller, an impressive piece of late 90s office design. It goes from
turns into
Levity → Frivolous, standing → stationary, months → period, desk → bureau, etc. But these automated crappy substitutions don’t appear in the heading and summary snippet that search engines display.
Death to spammers!
