This evening I came across a posting I made months ago on some computer magazine’s website. The content of my entry is unimportant.
The story came out in September, as did my comment. There were other comments after mine, then a pause for a month and, “Excellent, that was really well explained and helpful.”
I’m smelling something funny here.
When people comment they usually say and add something. This was too nondescript. I looked closer.
The posting was from “online casino.” BINGO!
Next I went to Google and searched the exact phrase, in quotes, plus the word “casino.” That would give me a fairly good idea how many times this comment spamming trick was successful¹
It looks like nearly 9,000 link placements. In an environment where links from site-to-site are important, this is cheap, if not sleazy advertising. It is part of the downside of removing human intervention from qualitative judgments.
¹ – Searching within quotation marks only returns the exact phrase you’ve included. Searching without quotation marks will allow returns that have the words, though in a different order or context. Looking at the number of hits when you’re searching without quotation marks is meaningless.