That being said, right here on my little ol’ website, I’ve noticed something that’s happened not once, but twice. It’s a new type of comment spam, and I have to say, I hesitantly approve. Here’s a link to the comments in question.

At first glance they appear to be genuine, human written comments. They relate to the material in question even though the material in question is old. The comments even come from verified Disqus (the software I use for my comment system) accounts. The only way you can tell that they’re quasi-spam is that the username is what SEO-types call keyword anchor text.

The idea behind commenting with anchor text is that with enough comments, Google will associate the terms in the link to the webpage that it’s pointing to. Back in the day, we called that Googlebombing and it is how one unfortunate writer was the #1 result for “talentless hack” and a certain President was ranked #1 for incompetent.

But wait, there’s a catch. As this was popular as an automated technique years ago, most blog comment programs add a small “nofollow” tag to comment links. The effect of this tag is that the link has no value to Google.

Click for visual aide

Beyond that, these commenters are leaving comments on posts that are months old, which essentially negates the chances of a human stumbling upon them and blindly clicking through.

The really strange thing is this – I’m not deleting the comments. Why? Have I gone soft and developed a love for BlackHat SEO done wrong? Nope. I’m not deleting these spam comments because they actually help me. You see, everytime someone with a Disqus account leaves a comment on my site, Disqus creates a followable link on the commenters page. This means while the comments don’t help the spammer, they do help me, if only a little bit.

And that’s the kind of spam I can live with.

Feel free to submit this letter or write your own. The Twitter Support page can be found here.

Dear Twitter Staff,

Due to the automation of Twitter Spam accounts through products like TweetTornado, I feel it’s in the best interest of both Twitter and the service’s users to enact two changes to registration process to hamper bulk registrations while still allowing legitimate users to register with ease.

The first such act would be to include a CAPTCHA. A solid CAPTCHA can reduce automated signups by 85%.

The second act would be the interrupt the signup process by enacting email verification. This is a more cumbersome task, which adds time to the process, but also puts the requirement of having an actual email address on those who which to create mass accounts.

I appreciate the quick response that Twitter takes to identify and suspend spam accounts, however, the number of spammers is rising, and a more proactive approach would be much appreciated. Thank you for your understanding.

[Name]