As you probably haven’t noticed, I’ve been neglecting the old blog a bit lately. Spending too much time having interesting discussions with people online and reading and playing games. But I noticed the comment notifications were piling up in the inbox, so I logged in to take a look.
Not being particularly concerned about these things, I’ve never bothered setting up something like Akismet or anything like that. And it’s not like this blog gets much traffic (or is really intended to).
Now, I keep up with the latest SEO trends, and I’m usually aware of the latest ideas about what works and what doesn’t. Clearly this is not the case for everybody.
The Fine Art Of Comment Spam
Now, 10 years ago, a forum or blog comment was a great way to get a link back to your site. And that’s because 10 years ago, Google wasn’t really paying much attention to where your links were appearing from. Even 5 years ago, you could pretty much get away with it.
But in those five years, things have changed significantly. Obviously not everybody got the memo.
Imagine my surprise to see that in 6 weeks, there were over 2,000 spam comments waiting for “approval.”

They ranged from pointing out how hard it was to find my blog on Google, and offering to help me build high quality social backlinks like the one on the right there, to ones offering targeted website traffic via some secret “traffic system.”
One of my favourites asks whether I’m having a problem with spam comments, with a link to some sort of footwear, it looked like. :D
(That’s a GMail screenshot, hence the warning.)

Missing The Point
This last one really blows my mind…it’s full of nofollow links. I mean really. :D Do you even SEO?
Now, that isn’t to say I haven’t sometimes had my doubts about just how “nofollow” nofollow links are, but spamming a single comment with no less than 20 utterly irrelevant nofollow links with keyword rich anchor text just seems…wasted?

Of course they’re all automated bot posts, but I can’t help but think of the people who are getting ripped off by some bugger offering them 100 links a month or whatever it is and plugging some keywords and URLs into his magic submitter or whatever the hell they use these days and calling it a night.
And as for the so-called SEO’s doing it…I mean…they have to know it’s pointless right? And I got 2,000+ of them in 6 weeks, and about 20 since I sat down to write this. No wonder people still speak of SEO as a dark art. Newsflash guys…this isn’t 2005 anymore.
I guess this is the sort of service you get if you believe one of those comments or emails.
Now excuse me while I go install Akismet. :D