Spammers Clog Up the Blogs 

Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, however, said comment spammers may be overestimating the influence blogs have over search-engine results.

"There have been some misconceptions that blogs have almost superhuman power over search engines, which is not the case," he said. "Some people may have bought into that hype and believed that all they needed to improve their ranking was to get a bunch of links from blogs."

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Sullivan added that whatever effect comment spam had on search-engine results would be unlikely to last long. "All spamming types of things are failing strategies," he said. "They may work for a very short period of time, but search engines come back, and it's another step in the constant arms race between search engines and the people who optimize for them."

For now, however, comment spam remains a serious nuisance. In some ways it is even more insidious than its e-mail counterpart. Where e-mail spam is at least easy to spot and delete, comment spam can pile up unnoticed in hundreds of separate comment threads.

And once a blogger spots an infestation, getting rid of the unwanted comments can be a tedious chore.

Six Apart co-founders Ben and Mena Trott said they planned to improve comment handling in upcoming releases of Movable Type and their hosted blogging service, TypePad. Among the features under consideration are bulk deletion of comments generated by a particular IP address, and the ability to delete comments directly from notification e-mails sent every time a user posts.

The Trotts cautioned, however, that there would be no quick fix. "Like e-mail, there isn't one simple solution that can be switched on and end spam completely," they wrote on Six Apart's official blog.

Not that there was any risk bloggers would adopt one simple solution. Only weeks after bloggers raised the cry for help, Movable Type users had devised numerous hacks, workarounds and full-fledged add-ons to combat the problem. Unsurprisingly, each generated its share of debate.

Many bloggers reported success at stopping the flow of spam, but everyone seemed to agree that what they had experienced so far was just a taste of what was coming.

As "Armed Liberal" wrote on WindsofChange.Net, "There's no reason these attacks couldn't be scaled to add hundreds of comments to each weblog, and no reason why they wouldn't be."

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