Talk to any group of happy go lucky bloggers for any length of time and you’ll inevitably touch upon the very unhappy topic of comment spam. What’s that, you ask? More net buzz that needs definition? Plain and simple, comment spam is the scourge of the democratization of media, a systematic shotgun blast at the proverbial side of the blog barn, a pack of rats nipping at the ankles of every publisher’s content management system (large or small), a flailing attempt by the unwitting to attain a fleeting sliver of traffic. Okay. so maybe that’s not so plain and simple…

Content spam is the crap you see (or don’t see) in the comment fields at the bottom of a blog entry. It may be entered either by hand (one by one) or by bots (in a broad blast). The unwitting hope is that they’ll gain traffic for their Web site — either directly or through blackhat SEO trickery — by placing links back to their site in a comment field.

Now there’s nothing wrong with a legitimate link back to a relevant website. The problem is that these are not legitimate links and the Web sites are, most often, not relevant.

As a reader, you won’t see the vast majority of content spam. Most serious content management systems provide the means to filter content spam, killing it before it reaches the reader’s and the search engine’s eyes.

Tags: spam, content management systems