> Can’t believe that: No one did it before me (to my knowledge)
This has certainly been done before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_trap
This has certainly been done before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_trap
Circa '98 IIRC, there was a module available for a webserver I worked with which generated a page with number of bogus email addresses per page, and a number of random urls per paged that when followed generated yet another page of bogus email addresses and links.
You hid the link somewhere on a legitimate page, added the base path as an exclude in robots.txt, and any mail harvesting spam-bots would get sucked in.
The idea may well have been around longer still.
I had to kill the experiment (no more new "pages" crawled) because of the CPU load and bandwidth costs, even throttling robots