Hiring: Comment Spam Writers by Ted Slater on 03/24/2009 at 10:52 AM

There's a special place in hell for those who write spam. A more special place for those who commandeer others' computers to send out that spam.

And a peculiarly special place in hell for those who earn a living by hiring others to submit phony comments on behalf of their clients.

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Over the past week The Line has been targeted by one of these comment spam services, perhaps the one managed by Jon Waraas. People from around the world -- British Virgin Islands, Russia, Switzerland, Germany, Moldova, Ukraine, India -- are hired to write phony comments with embedded links pointing to their clients' Web sites. This boosts their search engine rankings, and consequently traffic to their sites goes up. We've had to filter out hundreds of such comments in the past few days, over 50 since late last night alone. It's tiring to moderate these comments and ban these spammers' IP addresses, but the alternative is to have The Line overrun by comment ads for pharmaceuticals, pornography, travel agencies, jewelry, and other miscellaneous products and services.

I know it's a difficult job market right now, but pursuing employment as a full-time comment spammer is be beneath anyone. As is enacting a business model built on unwelcome and duplicitous deception. Yeah?

My wife's webzine has received some of these same comment spams. Have you too been the unfortunate recipient of such disingenuous comments?

Finally, a word to the comment spammers: Don't waste your time submitting them to The Line. They'll never see the light of day; and if you're super-clever and get one through, your links are rendered fruitless by our use of the "rel=nofollow" tag. And a warning to you and your clients: I'm pretty good tracking you down using your IP address and URLs (those to which you link and those to which your forum links redirect) and WHOIS and Google; and pretty good at reporting you to InterNIC and to your domain registrar.