As with email spamming and Usenet spamming in the nineties, blog comment spamming is on the rise as more people get easier access to the tools, and more lists of blogs, etc are made available. I haven’t seen statistical evidence, but I would assume the effectiveness of the actual spam, and the spams actually getting through to recipients or blog comment areas are in a reverse curve to these broadcast statistics, as more and more software tools for each style and type of spam get released.

Take for example, this humble blog. In a blog post way back 74 days ago, I showed a screengrab of Akismet, the auto comment spam plug in, showing 28,586 spams caught. Now, only two months later, I hit the 100,000 milestone a few days ago, and am currently sitting on 102,884 spams, or 74,298 spams in the last 74 days.

This seems similar to what most blogs are receiving, looking at the recent curve on the Akismet Zeitgeist.

You can see further evidence of spam in general, over at Commtouch’s live graph. A good list of anti-spam options for blogs is available on this Wikipedia entry.

Image: screen grab from blog admin panel.

It seems that the secret to driving traffic to your blog, is to target other blogs visitors, and then seed your adwords campaign in a way that your ad will show on their blog.

This is possibly the funniest use of Adwords I have seen to date. Look closely at the right hand side of the above screen grab from www.problogger.net. See the ad pointing visitors to www.johnchow.com? Well, it gets even better. When you click on that ad, you get taken to www.johnchow.com, only to find another Adwords ad, as per the below graphic.

This advertisement, folks, points through to www.baron.vc. This blogger then has a post mentioning John Chow, as per the next screen grab.

Shame that there were no Adsense blocks on the main page of this blog, otherwise I may have been tempted to do something crazy using my own Adwords campaigns. Is this a pay-per-click version of the old ‘web ring’ which was very popular in the nineties?

Images: Screengrabs from three blogs.