Today, I logged into one of wordpress blogs and noticed that I had a comment pending approval. I was pretty excited to see that someone had commented on my blog being that this is a pretty new blog that I set up. I went over to check out what the comment said. The comment read "i love your blog, i have it in my rss reader and always like new things coming up from it."

Needless to say, I got even more excited because it seemed pretty real. However soon after, my super "spidy spam sense" kicked in and gave me the feeling that this was probably a spam comment.

Too Vague/General

The first thing I noticed was that the comment was extremely vague. It did say that he/she loved my blog and had it in his/her rss reader. However, it didn't mention anything about my blog that they liked and didn't reference anything in my post.

Commenter's Name and URL

Initially the URL and name didn't have me suspicious. If someone is going to take the time to post a nice thoughtful comment on my blog, then I have no problem approving comments in which they have a url with a keyword that they want to rank for as their name.

Once I went to the website it seemed kind of spammy. It didn't have a whole lot of useful content. It just had the bar minimum along with a bunch of ads and adsense. Despite, that I would have approved the comment had it not been for what I found in the third step of my investigation.

Background Check Baby

So you're probably wondering how I managed to do a background check when I don't even know who this person is. Well, I didn't do that background check. I just did a quick google search. I copied the comment and pasted it into google's search bar. I then pressed entered. Guess what I found? They had been extremely busy posting the exact comment on a bunch of other blogs.

I doubt this was a person doing it. They probably had some sort of automated software or at least outsourced the task. Nonetheless, now that I knew they were posting the same worthless comment on blog after blog I sent that comment straight to the trash.

Now you know how to tell the difference between a genuine comment and a spam comment. I'm surprised that people waste time sending out useless comments. I am even more surprised that blog owners approve these comments. Moral of the story : If you leave a comment on someone's blog, be specific, helpful and relevant.