Most of the comment spam that I get on this blog is SEO spam. SEO stands for search engine optimization and is a means through which you can get your site to show up in more search engines, ranked higher and generate more traffic. I suspect, as anything, there is probably some legitimacy behind the practices. But I also get the feeling that, in general, it is a pretty sleazy business. And large part of my perception on that comes from the comment spam generated by SEO products and advisers.
Fortunately, the spam system traps most of these comments and they never see the light of day, but I scan through them every once in a while (looking for false-positives) and lately, I’ve been surprised at just how much of the overall spam is from SEO people and products. And most of them use the same tactics. A typical comment goes something like this:
After reading your blog post I browsed your website a bit and noticed you aren’t ranking nearly as well in Google as you could be. I possess a handful of blogs myself and I think you should take a look here: [site redacted]. You’ll find it’s a very nice tool that can bring you a lot more visitors. Keep up the quality posts.
Another variant goes something like this:
I’m sorry to annoy you like this but I just stumbled upon your blog and must admit it’s impressive. A little something which I believe would help you however is the [product redacted]. It’s in all honesty the best quality SEO plugin for wp that is available today. In exactly Five days my blog jumped from obscurity to the very first page of the search engines after making use of the [product redacted] plugin. In case you are at all serious about your site you can get it here: [site redacted].
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