It’s great that you guys think my blog generates enough traffic that you’re going through the trouble of not only typing in your comment spams by hand to get around the captcha requirement, but that you’re also taking the time to make the spam seem like an actual legitimate comment by making reference to the content of the thread you’re spamming or referring directly to myself. For example, the comment spam on my mother’s blog this morning that said something along the lines of “You have such a wonderful attitude as well. It’s great that Les has such a wonderful mother.” That was an impressively realistic sort of comment until I noticed the user name of the person leaving it just happened to be “Schmancy Named Weight Loss Clinics” and the link pointed to said clinic’s homepage.

I’ve also noticed that some of you are trying really hard to come up with comments that not only sound relevant to the discussion at hand, but in which you can put in a link to whatever page you’re promoting so that it doesn’t seem like an obvious attempt at spamming. Then you make the mistake of adding a rel="follow" tag to the link itself. I imagine that some folks out there don’t know that Google came up with the rel="nofollow" tag to help bloggers discourage comment spamming. In theory it’s supposed to tell Google and other search engines not to add to the page rank any of the links that contain that tag. The rel="follow" tag is relatively newer and it effectively doubles the value of a given link so anyone who leaves a comment with a link that has that tag in it is obviously trying to amp up their Google page rank. You couldn’t have a bigger flag saying I’M A STUPID COMMENT SPAMMER TRYING TO APPEAR SINCERE than that.

In both cases I end up closing the comment in question so I can mark it as spam using the Akismet module which adds to their database and helps prevent any follow up comments from making it past the filter. Really I’m flattered you guys are putting this much effort into it, but you should realize that your spams are likely only going to last a few hours before I trash them making the chance they get indexed by Google pretty small. Still, knock yourselves out I suppose. If nothing else it helps build up the Akismet database a bit more.