Everyone who’s ever been within ten miles of an internet connection knows about Spam. If you’ve got an email address you’ll almost certainly have received some Spam at some point. Chances are you’ve received a ton of the stuff and it irritates you on a daily basis. If you’re a blogger though, you’ll be even more annoyed by Spam than everyone else.

Comment Spam is a huge problem for bloggers. Those on the Wordpress platform can get hundreds of Spam comments per week as it’s so easy for crooks to set up automated mass-commenting scripts. The easy way to avoid most Spam is to install the ‘Akismet’ Wordpress plugin. This catches most comment Spam and it learns ‘on the job’, meaning it’ll adapt to new types of Spam when you tell it about those that slip through the net. Some of us haven’t needed any Spam filter at all for quite a while though because we’ve been using Disqus.

On top of all its other benefits, Disqus acts as a really good Spam filter as it requires commenters to be logged and can spot most Spam before it’s published. In recent times some Spammers have decide to get around the Disqus problem in a rather inefficient but incredibly annoying way; they’re being nice.

Take my post from last summer about Japanese TV, for example. I recently received two comments from separate Disqus account which were, on the face of it, harmless.

The first simply said: “I love japanese tv shows.“. The second read: “They show quite a few shows on challenge TV and they are always great fun to watch. Thanks for the post I am going to add your RSS to my reader now“. Aw, isn’t that nice?

They were both pretty rubbish comments, but they were obviously by people who had read my post rather than by an automated script. So how were they Spam? Well, one was written by someone called ‘London Treatment Rooms’ and linked to a private medical clinic in London while the other was written by ‘BusbyTest’ and linked to a page which was aimed at ‘SEO Masters’. My web analytics software reveals that both commenters found my site by searching Google for “Powered by Disqus”. In other words they were searching specifically for Disqus-powered blogs to Spam.

Surely that’s a really slow way of Spamming, typing each comment in by hand? It looks like what’s happening here is that people are spending their time doing the job manually, posting nice (if a little dull) comments and then using the URL link field in the comment to link to whatever they’re promoting. It’s slow but itgets around most Spam filters and it’s a great tactic for increasing the Google Pagerank of the sites they’re promoting.

Let’s face it; if you’re a blogger you’re bound to delete a comment promoting a discount drug website but if the comment says something nice you may want to keep it. Meanwhile, the Google spiders are crawling theweb, finding lots of links to some dodgy website and increasing its Pagerank as a result.

So,what can you do? It’s a little obvious but even if the Spam is nice you’re doing the internet a disservice by not deleting it. People are gaming Google’s search engine and you’re an unwitting accomplice. If the comment’s nice but comes from someone with a suspicious name (like ‘London Treatment Rooms’ or ‘Busby SEO’) get rid of it. Together we’ll clean up this town!