More Companies Embracing Comment Spam (Updated)

This is a sad trend I’ve started to see. Big name companies endorsing comment spam.

The comments are all too obvious. Someone posts seeming to have low-to-moderate experience with a topic. Then, in the middle, they link to a word like “antivirus” with a link to some company that rhymes with “Sophos”.

It’s highly unlikely from the tone of the comments that the individual would have even heard of Sophos (which only sells corporate antivirus software, anyways). This is clearly an effort to boost PageRank by flooding blogs with backlinks.

Guys, it’s a waste of money. 90% of bloggers now rel=nofollow on comment links, for this reason alone. Save your money, or risk your sites getting flagged as spam in legit comments.

Update: Sophos has contacted me to try to get to the bottom of this. They stated clearly that they did not engage in a comment spam campaign. This leads me to believe that a nefarious poster may be creating a comment spam bot, with the intention of getting certain sites banned by Akismet.

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