Over the last couple of days, Akismet racked up the 1000th attempt at spamming this site in just 3 months. Only one of those was a false positive (sorry Hans).

Over the time I have spent deleting spam from the Akismet section I have come to wonder what the spammers get out of it. Some comments are gibberish and the majority (on this site anyway) are trying to sell either fake drugs or sex. How is this going to help anyone who reads this blog? Wordpress now includes rel="nofollow" in all comment URLs which means that Google will not give any credit to those URLs in it's site rankings. So comment spam doesn't affect their hallowed PageRank. What is in it for them?

There Must Be Something

Well, for a start Google seems to be the only search engine that respects the nofollow rule. Searching for link:www.unintentionallyblank.co.uk on MSN or Yahoo brings up loads of results, many of which I know, without even checking, employ rel="nofollow" in their links. These links are being indexed even by the biggest of the lesser search engines, which means they must feature somewhere in the ranking algorithms. To contrast, Google returns 13 results that link to this site and MSN returns 415.

Next, there is always the possibility that, like any advertising, someone browsing the afflicted comments section of a victim blog is indeed looking for viagra, free sex videos or picnic baskets. The fact that setting up a bot to send out comment spam is so cheap means that any returns are good ones.

What To Do?

Comment spam must have it's benefits to the perpetrators so it won't be stopping until we can remove it from all blogs/guestbooks/forums/wikis/etc. so until then, how do you deal with it? I use Akismet, is there anything better? What are your favourite comment spams that you have seen?

Thank you Yvonne for the inspiration.