Blog Comment Spamming

When I posted my rant about 180 Solutions over at Ed's Gripe Line I ended up the 2nd highest ranked comment about these jokers. I actually have gotten email from a nice fellow in Switzerland and corresponded with him and the most excellent Matthew Doucette.

So now I'm going to post a quick link on another annoying issue.

Blog Comment Spamming.

People who want to raise their page rank of their site on Google are going into highly ranked blogs and posting links to their websites. My comment on 180solutions over at Ed's site had a new comment so I eagerly read it. It turns out that this was some online gaming spam.

I alerted Ed and then did some research about the topic. As I suspected Google is on top of the situation. Here is a post explaining what they are doing about this problem.

This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

Even Spocko's Brain with its 6 loyal readers (Hi Everybody!!! Thanks for stopping by!) has seen this problem in his own comments fields. I suppose I could be flattered, because they must think reaching my 6 very smart and influential readers might make them a sale. But I choose to expose their shenanigans while wearing my consumer advocate hat. (Hey! I get 200 quatloos for using two of my reasons for blogging in this post!)