Comment spam – These people are none too bright • Jonathan Eggers

The comment spam that is left on this site is absolutely ridiculous. Links surrounded by incoherent drivel that sometimes hardly passes for any language, whatsoever. Now, I'm not against anyone promoting their site in a comment, so long as the comment adds value to the conversation. What I don't understand is why some people believe that they can generate value-added comments, that will properly promote their website, through automated commenting systems. It is impossible to come up with a comment that is relevant to the topic being discussed, and adds value, when you haven't read the actual post. Comment spam is a tool for fools! I recently received this comment on my article, The Importance of Having a Good Registrar, in which I discuss being held hostage by a nefarious domain registrar. Ellie25: You have to know that I from time to time buy an essay and buy term papers using essay writing service and students order custom essays close to this good topic . Thus, thanks a lot for the very important knowledge! Considering that my article is about domain registration and the importance of dealing with a reputable company, this comment has no place on that post - or my blog for that matter. I've never written anything about buying essays, nor do I think my readers have any interest in buying essays. This comment is completely irrelevant to my post and blog, There's no reason why this should have been posted to my site. I guess that whoever is running the comment software widened the search parameters to include the word "registrar," thinking that would catch posts about college. I think the person promoting this site would have better results focusing on a few specific college websites and hand-posting relevant comments on those sites. Here are three spam comments from my recent article, The Failure of Social Media Games, which discusses how current social media games are failing to be truly social. Serita Vanmiddleswor: Oh my god. This freaking is just awesome. I just found a new mafia wars cheat. They really do work unlike 99% of the other crud out there! It’s really cool too… Check my website for it .. Annis Brackman: grrr, i want to play my farmville!! what’s up with all of these issues?? Bella Nugan: Facebook is quite fun, but its not much fun when its blocked at school. Jump on a free Facebook Proxy and you can unblock it straight away. At least these comments are on the topic of social media and social media games - that's an improvement. However, none of them are actually relevant to the article, nor add anything to the discussion. Serita's name links to a site with mafia war cheats, Annis's name links to a site with Farmville cheats, and Bella's to a proxy service. Bella's comment is surprisingly well-written, and could be considered good ad copy - it's just completely irrelevant. Aren't there plenty of sites, forums, and chatrooms where people are already discussing cheats and proxy services? These comments would be appropriate there and would add value to those conversations. Well, except for Annis, who is trying to hide his spam link with a "legitimate" comment. Annis would be much better off openly promoting their site on a forum discussing cheats, rather than trying to hide it on my blog. While the automated comment software did a better job finding a relevant post, it still isn't able to create comments that add value to the post - that can't be done successfully by software. Again, building a network on sites specific to the site you're promoting is much more effective than trying to blanket sites with worthless posts. Lastly, here's a comment from an ancient post: National lottery: Sorry to be upfront but do you mind telling your readers about my blog as it covers a similar topic? If so, for how much? :) Thanks! I don't think my blog EVER covered the topic of lottery. If this person was truly asking for a link exchange, or to purchase a review, they could have easily used my contact form – not that I would have sold a review, especially for a site that has no relevance to my areas of discussion, so my guess it this is an attempt as using bulk comment software to try to get site reviews... maybe. What an odd model of self-promotion. I understand how important it is to get your site out there and to generate traffic. However, dumping irrelevant comments into blogs is not the answer. Adding value through a meaningful comment is ALWAYS welcome on any site – and is a good promotional practice. But, unless you add value, your comment isn't going to generate any traffic, even if it isn't considered spam. I'm going to post every spam comment this site receives in the comments of this page. I think it would be interesting for people to see what kind of junk comes in. Of course, I'll remove all links.