I have received a ton of spam comments recently! These comments are almost always nonsense with a specific link. I can only think of two reasons for posting a spam link in a comment:

  • transferring google juice from the host site to the linked site (SEO)
  • hoping against hope that someone will read the nonsense and click your random, bogus link.

Of the options, (1) was a viable strategy in 2006! Google nipped that in the bud because of the popularity of this technique. Now, SEO is stifled by a simple rel="nofollow" tag, which my site automatically embeds in comment links. So stop spamming!

(2) above seems like a total waste of time. Sure, finding comments sections and posting a links is functionally free, but I’d guess that only 1/100 sites allow spam comments and maybe 1/1,000 people would click on a random link. With that back-of-the-napkin math, you’d need 100,000 comments to get one click! Even then, conversion rates of 5% are considered good, so you’d need 2,000,000 comments to get one buyer. On top of that, at least half the sites with open commenting will have Akismet or a similar spam-guard. What is your time, electricity, and bandwidth worth if you’re betting on those odds? Certainly your time is better spent elsewhere. So stop spamming!

(I’d have to investigate further, but I’d guess bot-nets are being used to post comments at a very affordable rate. At worst, some script kiddies are learning computer science so they may get a nice job later.)

Am I missing something?