A Murder of Crows has a interview 
with a London-based comment spammer who describes how he pastes his comment spam all over the net.
Link spamming, if you don’t know, is the attempt to increase the search engine ranking of PPC (Pills, Porn and Casino) sites by posting URLs as comments on blogs. Search engines then index them and the PPC sites rise in the rankings.
Interestingly, the spammer doesn’t aim to raise his product to the number one spot. “Actually, 8, 9 and 10 have better conversion rates,” he says. “I don’t know why. Maybe the eyes fix on it when you scroll down the page.â€
He also explains why he does it (money) and how it he is not as evil as email spammers:
Sam distances himself, very definitely, from email spammers – particularly those who use tailored viruses to turn broadband-linked PCs into spam generators. “I’m using badly-configured proxy servers. I believe that’s different from those which are hacked. But I speak to the top seven or eight link spammers, and they don’t use bot PCs. People who do blog spamming won’t be doing email spamming.†Using proxy servers, Sam argues, is legal.
This guy takes a public defecation on blogs everywhere and then says that he’s not “as evil as…” while conceding the main charge that he is doing evil things. It’s really quite disengenious, as cleaning up linkback spam is much more of a hassle than filtering your email.
You’ll get no argument from me on this one! Comment spam is the bane of my life. I can’t imagine how bad it would be if Akismet (an WordPress anti-spam plugin) didn’t catch 98% of it.