Recently I've been hit in the past week or so two separate requests to fix broken links on old blog posts, each 4 years old or older. The first is a "Nice try" for for a rather crappy tech blog. Comparitech seems to a form spammer. Comically, the example I found is from the FreeBSD Pipermail mailing list about an archived article from 2002, about VNC portal mail configging. The bot suggests linking to an article explain the difference between VNC and a VPN.

Ellen Fisher <ellen@comparitechmail.net>
3:50 AM (9 hours ago)
Hi Greg,

I found a link that isn’t working on one of your pages and thought you’d want to know.

I landed here - http://blog.greggant.com/posts/2013/10/17/53-mac-only-design-development-utilities-apps.html, and noticed you have a link to the Webgraph Facebook Blocker tool (http://webgraph.com/resources/facebookblocker/) which seems to have been discontinued.

We have a guide to help people stop Facebook tracking them across the web - SPAM URL removed

If you are updating your page, perhaps you could point people to our guide instead?

I hope this helps!

Thanks,
Ellen
-----
Ellen Fisher
Comparitech

Yeah, I'm not going to do that. The guide was very so-so, and a bit out of date to boot.

The second instance is interesting for the persistence, three separately e-mails spaced out. The link in question, was to a website offering a pirated flash version of Plants vs Zombies. As I do not have flash installed, I couldn't comment onto the quality but likely it was advertisement loaded.

Jessica Bridges <jessycatbridges@gmail.com>

Mar 15

to blog
Hey there,

Are you able to please update something on your website?

You were linking to the Plants vs Zombies game on this page of your website - http://blog.greggant.com/posts/page8/
The link was going to this game - http://www.popcap.com/games/pvz , but I guess since popcap sold PVZ to EA they took the game away....

Here is a secure working version I found on Google - SPAM URL REMOVED

Hope it helps! Classic game =)

----
Jessica Bridges
Digital Artist & Illustrator @ Jess Creative

The spammer tries to engage again.

Jessica Bridges <jessycatbridges@gmail.com>
Hey again,

I emailed a few days ago about the Plants vs Zombies broken link on your site, wondering if you had the chance to update it yet?

Don't mean to pester you, just my OCD talking =)

Best,
Jess

Last try...

Jessica Bridges <jessycatbridges@gmail.com>
Hey again,

Last email I promise =) Just wondering if you've received my emails below about the broken link? I don't mean to be a nag, I'm just kind of a nerd for these things =)

Cheers
Jess

My guess is these are bots pre-programmed with to search the bowels of google for links or broken links as an angle to target small websites to correcting URLs as a way to gain standing via backlinking to gain page weight in Google. The Jessica bot is interesting for the follow ups. My theory is it'd spammed me repeatedly even if I had changed the link.