Recently a Chinese pirate outfit has been blasting blogs (including this one) with spam comments. The last four I received were:

• Hello,I noticed your blog named “Weight Loss Lies, Redux (for the jillionth time) | Playing in the World Game” like every week. Your humoristic style is witty, keep up the good work! And you can look my website about 雷神索爾. (That’s the Chinese Title for “Thor”)
• Dear Sirs,I read your article named “Marketing moves the goalposts again. | Playing in the World Game” on a regular basis. Your humoristic style is bravo, keep it up! And you can look our website about 無名套裝. (No-name suit, whatever that means)
• Hello,I saw your blog named “Weight Loss Lies, Redux (for the jillionth time) | Playing in the World Game” like every week. Your writing style is awesome, keep doing what you`re doing! And you can check my website about 藍光影片. (Blu-Ray)
• Hello,I checked your blog named “Marketing moves the goalposts again. | Playing in the World Game” on a regular basis. Your story-telling style is awesome, keep doing what you`re doing! And you can see our website about 藍光影片. (Blu-Ray)

Thank Mogg for services like Akismet, which has filtered 31,614 spam comments from my blog since its inception^[1], and some few still get through, which I have to filter out by hand. Websites that are not moderated can accumulate hundreds or even thousands of spam comments on a single page.

The point of this exercise is that each spam comment has an embedded link to a product site, which links serve to boost that page’s ratings during a web search. What the spammers don’t get is that Google is doing its best to make sure that pages which try to increase traffic in this way are punished. The downside is that if you allow comment spam to accumulate on your own blog, its rankings will also diminish. So if you’re a blogger, make sure only valid comments are allowed to stay on your pages, and if you’re using Akismet on WordPress, make sure you empty your spam folder regularly, just for extra safety.

In case you were not sure, any company that engages in this kind of practice to increase their business is immoral, unclean, reprobate and nefarious – not to mention downright criminal – and you should never deal with them. Most of this garbage comes from Asia; I would love to see anyone who spreads this kind of ejecta spend a few years in a hard-labor re-education camp.

It is conceivable that some of these blog spam comments have been placed by disreputable marketing firms hired by legitimate businesses – as Eric Turkewitz has commented over at his personal injury law blog, “outsourced marketing = outsourced ethics.” Frankly, I’ve never seen one.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1]And some 25 billion total between 2005 and 2011. By now the total should be significantly higher.