Mystery

Is anyone, anywhere, fooled by comment spam? Is it effective, in the slightest?

Comments

[boo]

I believe the point of the spam has something to do with Google ranking (increasing the link density to the site in question), and they aren't trying to convince anyone reading the comments.

[Slice]

Got my first comment spam about a week ago. Actually freaked me out a bit, can't understand how they do it. At the very least they could post their spam to an entry that is somewhat related to the topic, but I guess spammers don't have high standards.

Gotta love that 'delete comment' feature on typepad.

[pjm]

What boo said.

Since it's all for the spiders, it's effective as long as the blog owner doesn't clean it up. (That's why they go for older entries - you seldom see comment spam on newer entries.)

[Yeoman Lawyer]

It sure is irritating. I had some recently myself.

[A. Rickey]

Indeed, no one is ever supposed to read it, which is why spam generally targets old entries. If you're vaguely interested in how Google-rank works, you can scan my blog for old descriptions, but trust me, the only people it means to fool are little Google robots...

[David Giacalone]

What about Referer List spam? That really annoys me and definitely turns me off to the product in question.

[pjm]

David, same problem - some sites actually list, say, "Last 10 Referrers" or something like that, or if they link to their own statistics where referrers are listed. Enough that it's worth the referrer spam, especially to someone who's not paying anything for it.

I don't display referrers, nor do I have public stats, but it's frustrating that I can't even trust my own stats because of all the manure.