Seems like spammers are taking to spamming weblog comments wherever they are allowed with innocuous-looking content-free posts just to link back to themselves. (Is this somewhere between spam and bacn, since it’s not quite spam? I was unsure at first, but now I think it’s just spam.)

Typically these posts will be written in a fairly reasonable facsimile of English, and not overtly spammy — a bunch of compliments I’m almost egotistical enough to believe, except there’s no relation to the post they’re commenting on, and somewhere at the end, a link to some site they’re pimping.

These range from the fairly obvious link

to a link trying to masquerade as a signature

to links only in the author’s name

and then there’s the variant using Tumblr’s “like” feature, as in

or

and for a final really blatant example, there’s this guy:

These last ones might actually require more than 2 seconds of thought to recognize as spam, if they didn’t appear in batches of 8 on the same post.

Needless to say, I just delete all these, except for the Tumblr “like” spam which I don’t know how to target directly. (The next step would be turning off both comments and Tumblr “notes” in the theme, which would make these problems go away entirely.)

The ironic thing is these people are probably doing this for Google link juice, but the way comments work via Disqus, it’s all Javascript and not in the real HTML as the page loads anyway, so I doubt indexers follow it. Plus I just delete it anyway. Spammers, if you’re reading this, you’re just wasting your time and mine.