Posters using Comment Kahuna, Fast Blog Finder and other SEO tools are driving me nuts!

For those of you civilians (non-web-geeks) who are here just for the woodworking and tool advice; God bless you!  Unfortunately we have been besieged in recent weeks with outrageous amounts of spam comments on our blogs.  One of the things that I’ll admit up front is that Blogger makes is a little tough to comment as it is.  You need to first click on the title (which is a link) to get to the individual post, and then you are able to post a comment.  Apparently webmasters and bloggers who are looking to boost traffic to their sites are using software such as “Comment Kahuna” and “Fast Blog Finder” to locate blogs that are somewhat related to the keywords they use on their own site, and which accept comments.  From there they post a comment and a backlink to their site.

This does two things:
1. It may attract readers directly from the blog, or
2. By having a non-reciprocal link from another, well respected site, it lends credibility to their own site in the eyes of search engines like Google.  This is what is known as SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

What is sad is that this activity doesn’t have to be entirely one-sided; it’s just that the spammers are posting nonsensical and off topic comments all in the effort to serve their own desires.  Look, to be honest with you I’ve posted comments on other sites with this very goal in mind, but when I do so I only reply to a post or thread that I am truly interested in, or where I feel my comment will add some value to the conversation.

So, let it be known from this day forward that while I will continue to accept and even encourage comments, I will moderate them carefully.  Feel free to backlink to your related sites and blogs, but if your comment is entirely self-serving it will be deleted.

Now, back to the shop.  What are you building these days?