Lately I’ve noticed some new and disturbing trends in blog spamming techniques. Among the most prevalent are commenters who spend time building up a considerable number of comment back links on a seemingly non-commercial site in order to later convert that site into a commercial free-for-all.

This behavior is inherently unethical. Bloggers, like myself, only allow links to be associated with commenter’s names for the purpose of getting to know who they are, not so our visitors will follow links only to be subjected to commercial solicitation. Posing as legitimate is nothing new, spammers have been faking regular commenter names for a while now.

On this blog, my own Terms of Use specifically prohibit such activity - though I have to delete posts all day, every day for violating them. On this blog alone Akismet has marked 71,000 Spam comments. And that is nowhere near the total number of Spammers stopped.
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