Autogenerated nonsense pages?

what are they, who makes them and why?

[backdraft7]

Recently I have been monitoring certain keywords using Google Alerts.
So, I'm going through the results and I keep finding pages with gibberish text which appears to be scraped from a large variety of sources or auto generated and what appears to be crude script generated images, similar to what you'd find with CAPTCHA, but in different sizes containing pastel colors, lines and text.
There is always a spam link contained on the page.

Are people really fooling themselves into thinking the search engines will think this is new content?
What is the point to this obvious form of web pollution?

Any insights are welcomed...

[limoshawn]

I don't know much about these types of pages other than i see tons of them. What i do know, and you said it yourself, is the they do come across as a google alert so on some level google is picking it up. Not only is google picking it up but they are promoting it to anyone like you who has requested an alert on the topic.

[aristotle]

If someone sets up programs to automatically create millions of these spam pages on a continuing basis, a small percentage of them might sneak into Google's SERPs, at least temporarily, and bring enough traffic to make the scheme profitable.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

You didn't think all of those "ultra secret formula to richness" sites with "look at the proof" screenshots plastered all over actually took the time to get decent backlinks as proof did you?

I'd guess that the people who do this have blinders on and only one goal when they launch so much spam, perhaps it's targeted at a particular affiliate network. Perhaps it's ad network owners just trying to generate impressions, who knows. It's probably got nothing to do with Google.