We all have our particular windmills at which we must tilt.  The blogger at the Keitai Goddess is engaged in a war to stop comment spam.  What’s interesting is that one of the spammers actually responded to her.  The respondent’s sense of entitlement to use of our blogs for marketing purposes is breathtaking:

Leaving comments on your blog linking back to our site is a fair trade as long as the comment is relevant and a decent length.  Many SEOs say content is king when it comes to ranking in Google and Yahoo, but this is not true.  Links are king and links from good websites are king.  Content comes in at a close second.  We give you content that makes YOUR site rank higher for different keywords and you give us a link back to our site that helps our site rank higher.  I don’t see how this is not a fair trade.  We’re not “parasites” like the people who comment on blogs and leave (sometimes literally) over 100 links in the comment and completely ruin that page’s pagerank.  I’ve seen people put links on blogs that run anywhere from 1 to 200.  We leave a relevant reply, take 1 link, and leave.  The ones who put more than 1 link in their reply are the parasites, not us.

I really have to wonder what this spammer thinks “relevant” comments are.  I’ve seen crap like “great article,” or even some that try to summarize the gist of my posting, but they’ve all been very transparent as text used for filler just to get their link past the spam filters.

Anyhow, the “conversation” got a bit heated, and the spammer really lost her cool in her followup message, to the point of acting like a creepy stalker by searching out Keitai Goddess’s comments on other blogs and claiming that those were somehow unethical or hypocritical because those comments included a link back to her site.

Really, the tiniest bit of common sense would have revealed to the spammer the difference between a real comment and one done solely for SEO purposes.  The rule that I use for determining if a link/comment is spam is that if the comment is truly relevant and adds something new, then I examine the link to see if it is back to the person’s personal site or to a commercial site.  If it’s to a commercial site, and I don’t recognize the online “persona” as belonging to someone I personally know who is associated with that enterprise, then it’s spam.  Period.  End of discussion, no debate allowed. 

In other words, commercial entities are NOT ALLOWED to post comments on my blog.  My comments are intended to be by and for people.  The only time I might entertain a comment associated with a commercial entity is if I’ve commented about that entity’s products or services.  However, the person doing the response must do so under a real name and they must identify themselves as being associated with the company.  Anything else would border on dishonesty or sock-puppetry.