After I published my post on potential offsite backup solutions, I got a few comments in my moderation queue. Most of them were obvious spam, on unrelated topics such as gambling. However I did see one comment that made a coherent statement on the subject, and then recommended a site for comparing backup services. Unfortunately for the commenter, I recognized it as the same comment I saw on another blog entry about the subject. On the other blog entry, the comment stood out since it wasn’t exactly relevant to the particular type of backup being discussed, and so I assumed it was spam.
So how can you prevent these sneaky comments from appearing on your blog, without looking at everyone else’s comments? It’s easy: just go to your favorite search engine and enter a portion of the text in quotes, so it searches for the exact phrase. If it brings up results of the same comment on other blogs, you probably want to delete it.
Update: Jason also warns about compliment spam. I know I’ve seen someone fall for this until I politely pointed it out to him.
wow. targeted, relevant advertising! That could have been useful!
More tips in a post I made at work.