Over the last several months, since I started writing this blog I’ve noticed a tiny trickle of visitors. Most seem interested in the Acer H340 that a blogged about in my first post. I felt bad for many of them, seeing their search keywords, knowing my little bit of writing wouldn’t help their plights. The only consolation to this has been that I knew adding the link to whsplus.com at the bottom of the article had been a smart move, as it seemed to help those poor folks out.

However, for the longest time I received almost no comments on any of my articles. While I would love nothing more than to see readers talking and asking questions in my comments area, I knew that not only have I failed to advertise this site, but that I really do not have any real compelling content as of yet. After all, this is nothing more than a personal side project.

Beginning when I changed the site’s name a month back I started to notice another change. I started to see some comments come through. The first was a classic bit of spam, all filled with links to various sites. Akismet caught it though, so no worries there. Then I noticed several others that, while short, seemed to be written by people. Finally living breathing people reading my site!! Or perhaps not.

It seems that comment spam has entered a new realm. Now spammers are smart enough to know that they can’t just add in a bunch of links and hope the comment makes it through. They need to seem like they actually are responding to your post.

In these cases I noticed a few things that gave it away.

1. The posts all contained very vague text that really could apply to 50% of any blog post out there.
2. The posters all gave links to websites that generally linked to a specific post on a blog that talked about a product. Some sites were very convincing except that when looking through other articles, most were devoid of content with only a few actual posts, all with a link to amazon selling the product in question.
3. None of them seemed to enter the site with a referer or from a search engine. Which tells me they came to my site directly, which given the age and nature of my blog is beyond improbable that I have a readership beyond a few friends and most likely my mother (Hi MOM!)

Anyway, so I am officially locking down comments and will be looking for real visitors along with them. This is mostly because I do not want to help people scam others out of money by increasing a blogs influence rate in search rankings.

Anyone have any tips for weeding out blog spam they’d like to share?