Lately, I have been getting quite a number of comments that are relevant, yet not relevant and Akismet let them pass through as legitimate comments. If it sounds confusing I’m sorry. I mean relevant in the sense that the comments don’t seemed to be from an automated software but was done in flesh and blood and irrelevant in the sense that the sites that the comments came from are from marketing sites that has no bearings whatsoever. This made my suspicious that these comments were indeed from automated comment spam software, but how did they make it to put in so relevant comments?
In most cases, comment spam software will insert comments like, “HI, Good Site!” or something of that nature. This normally gets caught by Akismet. However in the present scenario, the comments will be concentrated on your post’s topic, which make it seems like the commentator has indeed visited your site and made a comment.
In the first few instances, I was stumped. When I checked on the sites that made the comments, it was some marketing site propagating some products or some foreign language site. Now, I am quite sure the owner of these sites did not come here personally to make that comment and my suspicions was confirmed today when I discovered that there was a software being distributed freely that lets them make comment in blogs in bulk.
The sole purpose of this software is to let the user get easy back-links from blogs that offers “dofollow” links in their comments. Believe it or not, there are still plenty of blogs that uses the “dofollow” plug-in. Now what this software, does is, the user will type in a keyword or key phrase on the kind of topics they want links from. The software will then scrape the Net for blogs that have post concerning that topic. It will return a full list of blogs, complete with their page rank and linking attributes, whether they are dofollow or nofollow blogs.
The user then enters a fake name, a fake email but his real URL into the software. He then makes a very relevant comment that will suit most of the blogs topic. He chooses the blogs he wants to comment, click on it, the blog’s page will appear, he scroll to the comments section, clicks on the “Fill” option and whatever he has filled into the software just now will be filled up in the comments of that blog post. So in short, he comments once, keeps clicking on the bloglist that the software has provided him with and within a short time he would have submitted legitimate comments to hundreds of blogs.
Is it ethical to spam comments this way? The blogs that gets the comment gains nothing except in the number of comments. Their readers gains nothing. The only person gaining is the “spammer”. He will definitely be getting some curious clicks if he word his comments correctly and he might be getting some backlinks from those “dofollow” blogs. I don’t know about you, but I delete every comment of this nature. I rather let my comment number show a big fat zero than let the one way benefit go to the barger.
I would agree that it is not ethical to use software to comment on blogs, as well as comment just for the sake of a backlink.
This is a trend that will unfortunately continue as long as there are benefits for this kind of behavior!
I believe that a blog comment should add value to the blog post or at least be a part of an ongoing discussion.
P.S. I like your blog:-)
josip
Guys if you are curious how comments form these aresholes looks like, this one is the perfect example. I’m leaving the above comment here as an example, but I have deleted the link. Looks very legitimate right? It’s a scam.