I've been seeing a new kind of spam recently: blog-comment spam. Actually, this has been around for a long time, but it has recently become much less stupid.

Before, spammers would try to leave comments on my blog that had some kind of explicit "buy our worthless junk" message, plus a link to their site. The spammers hoped to find unmoderated blogs where these comments would be approved automatically, and would stay up until the blogger noticed them and deleted them.

Now, the actual message consists of nothing but unfocused, non-specific praise for the blog. No ad at all. But there's still a link back to the spammer's site.

The goal here is not so much that readers of the blog will click on the link, since they probably won't, but to fool Google into thinking that the spammer's site must be important, since so many other sites link to it!

So now I delete all comments that contain nothing but empty praise and a link. I wonder how many bloggers are so starved for attention that they let such comments stand? Probably a lot. Might make an interesting research paper, if you're in the psychology biz.

By the way, this blog uses the b2evolution package, which is great, but in the future I'm just going to go with blogger.com, and let Google do all my maintenance and updates and backups for me. The price is right (free!), and, frankly, they're better at it than I am.