Oh dear oh dear.

I have received some comment spam today that I found so amusingly clumsy that I have decided it deserves something more than my usual “hit the spam button in Wordpress and sigh” response.

Today, we have our inaugural member of the Planet of the Penguins Roll of Shame.

Congratulations www.seoclientprospectingrobot.com

The spam comment was attached to my article “How To Haiku” and ran as follows:

This might be a little off subject, but have you looked at seoclientprospectingrobot dot com? Just wondering if you have any reviews of it, I’m thinking of buying a copy, and wanted to see if anyone had bought a copy yet.

OK, so what’s wrong with this piece of comment spam and why do think it is particularly worthy of ridicule?

1. “It might be a little off subject”

   Yes, it certainly is. About forty thousand leagues away from the actual topic of the post in fact. There is no conceivable link between the post and the comment. This is either lazy spamming or spamming that tried not to be lazy but went very, very wrong when confronted with my post.

   Somewhere between 0 and 5 out of 10 for effort, 0 out of 10 for effectiveness www.seoclientprospectingrobot.com.
   

2. It is using “black hat” SEO techniques to advertise SEO software that may or may not itself be sporting a dark chapeau

   Spamming blogs that allow public comments, like this one, is a common “black hat” SEO practice; designed to inject links into sites and thus increase the page rank and perceived relevance of the target site. Search engine spiders see the link, or mention of the link, from my site to www.seoclientprospectingrobot.com and then count that as a “vote” for that site, improving its search engine position.

   Spam links, therefore, attempt to abuse this very democratic system of links=votes by creating links automatically.
   
   So, I have to say there is a certain irony in finding a spam comment that is trying to improve the search engine position of a web page about software that … improves your search engine position. Irony, and no small amount of annoyance. Nice try www.seoclientprospectingrobot.com

So, not a very good effort overall. Really … quite, quite poor.

I must point out at this point in time that I don’t know if the software available from www.seoclientprospectingrobot.com was used to commit this crime against intelligence, or if perhaps it was the work of someone else. You would have to ask Sophie, via seo4u@live.com, who originally posted the comment. Allegedly.

Best of luck in your next job Sophie.

Chris out.

(And for anyone who knows SEO and is wondering why I keep giving links to the site that has earnt my wrath today … well, wouldn’t it be quite cool if this could become the top rated post when searching for www.seoclientprospectingrobot.com? Don’t delay, trackback, pingback, and comment on this post today!)