I’ve noticed a significant increase in comment spam… mostly poorly hidden (sorry http://losebellyfat.profitcruiser.com ) I noticed some referrals coming in from http://wpblackhat.com/commenter/modifiedblog.html . After looking into it, I found this site : http://www.contentgeneration.org/wpblackhat-faqs/ . Apparently you can sign up for $89 a month and get lots of tools and scripts to fake out Google, Amazon, and other affiliate programs by forcing visitors directly to ad links when they click on links that are supposed to go to a real posting. The also have lots of blog scraping tools that will generate craptastic conglomeration sites using other peoples content, which they plaster with ads.

The end result is that it is getting very hard to tell a real comment from a spam comment… so many comments are going to the askimet spam folder.

While none of this appears illegal… i’m sure it will hurt everyone long term… bloggers, affiliate programs, and anyone doing a search for real content.