Dion Moult Seriously who ever reads this description.

hari says: (15 August 2009)

I think most human spammers must be retarded in some way or the other for choosing such a despicable way of making money, but I think you are right. People who choose to buy comments are actually one step lower if anything.

The worst part is that this spam trend is leading to bloggers closing their comments or heavily moderating them and thus leading to lesser genuine interaction.

You’d be amazed at the number of blogs where manual comment moderation is turned on and your comment doesn’t appear until the blog owner approves (and in many cases, I think they don’t care any way for the interaction)

Dion Moult says: (16 August 2009)

It’s true that a lot of blogging is about getting community feed back on your ideas. However yes buying comments is a bit extreme. Another way I like to look at blogging is simply a writing exercise to keep myself on my toes.

In fact, my own blog practices the manual comment moderation. Sorry to say but once you whitelist or ignore a single IP/hostname, Akismet isn’t going to argue with you.

hari says: (16 August 2009)

I don’t blame the bloggers who choose to moderate comments, but it’s a bit of a dampener on discussion and feedback.

I think that if some bloggers don’t want feedback, they should turn off the commenting system altogether. It saves time that way. I hate wasting time commenting when my comment won’t appear for days or sometimes forever.

Tarik says: (18 August 2009)

>< yeah it really sucks the way comments have to be so heavily moderated, totally detracts from the site interaction.

you might find that adding the nofollow tag to comment post links will help stop the manual spammers targeting your site.

they are making those posts in order to gain a backlink and leech some of your page rank. its all in a bid to boost search engine ranking. Black Hat seo imo

Dion Moult says: (18 August 2009)

Leech some of my page rank? At 2/10?

They must be desperate.

Tarik says: (18 August 2009)

hehe yeah, it all ads up! and a nice backlink to boot!

i guess it would be acceptable if the link they provided was complimentary to the article.. but it never is!

hari says: (18 August 2009)

Tarik, nofollow doesn’t help. The name-link I give through comments are no-followed. I have also disabled URLs in the comment body completely, but spammers still continue to haunt the blogs.

I suspect that many of the human spammers simply post in the hope that they get a URL somehow or the other. Doesn’t even matter if it is not a hyperlink.