Spam. It's not just for email anymore.
I often get the question of why people send spam. Money is the simple answer. As spam fighting software slowly matures and gets better and email users slowly (how dense or desperate can some people be) stop buying stuff from spam, the purveyors of spam look elsewhere. One profitable place they have utilized lately is blog's comments. Many web sites (including ours) encourage readers to leave comments. Spammers figured out a way to program Internet bots to automatically find these types of sites and pummel them with 'comment spam'. They leave links to all kinds of sites from porn to real estate and sell everything from Viagra to cell phone batteries. Again, some crazy people actually click on these links and buy the products or services. Cha-ching!
Even newer than comment spam is a phenomenon known as splogs. These are sites that pose as real sites, but are nothing more than a site full of links to other sites or more splogs. The sole purpose of these types of sites is to generate revenue. You may have run across one of these sites and not even known it. After doing a search, you click a resulting link and end up on a page full of advertising and links to sites with the topic you searched for but no actual information on the topic…that's a splog.
We can all combat spam in any of its forms by never clicking the links and for sure never buying the products or services they sell. It will never disappear, but we can slow it down and make it less profitable for these mud-dwellers.
