For the uninitiated, blogs like ours get lots of unrelated comments from automated software. The reason being is that Google ranks sites higher the more inbound links they have - links from other sites.  A quick and dirty way of getting links in is to blast blog sites with lots of comments, most blogs publish the website of the author, therefore getting a link.  The problem is that it is against Google's terms and conditions, causes us developers a lot of problems in handling such spam and actually in the medium term doesn't work.

The embarrasment for me is how much of it comes from my own industry.  There's a web design company in Cardiff and an SEO company in Bristol who love to spam my comment forms.  I'm not naming and shaming - you see Google isn't stupid, what it does is takes note of the quality as well as the quantity of links and when it sees something is way off the scale, it removes sites from its index.  Simple as that.  So although a site may get an instant 'hit' from this tactic, in the medium to long term it causes their sites (or their client's sites) to fall off Google completely.

For our client sites we have a range of tactics to deal with this sort of spam, but for our own we just can't be bothered.  As the net becomes more interactive and Search Engines become more important, this is only going to get a bigger problem.

We prefer a more organic approach to SEO - building up a client's presence on the net.  It works.  And for the spammers - hey good luck.  I'd rather get steady and gradually improving SEO rankings than be number one for a week, and then wiped off the map for good.