I’m a success!
Really. I am. I know this because my blog is starting to be inundated by spam. I’m getting spam comments at a rate of 6-to-1 versus actual comments. I could ask y’all to get more engaged by submitting real comments (wink), but I’d rather celebrate my little successes.
The thing about spam comments, as annoying as they are, is that it means someone outside my usual network has started finding my blog. That’s a search optimization success story. Some of my spammers, of course, are offering to help me with search optimization. But I’m smart enough to know that the best SEO improvement I can make would be to post more frequently. So, no, Adrian and Elena and Vasco (or whatever your real names were), I won’t be contacting you to join your link farm or pay you money to post spam links to my blog elsewhere on the Internet.
I will, though, share my favorite spam comment that I’ve received to date. It started: “You are my inhalation.” Really? Wow! I don’t think even my husband would try to say that with a straight face. (Well, my cartoonist husband doesn’t actually say too many things with a straight face; he’s one of the funniest people I know.) But if I can really be your inhalation, I’m thrilled. And giggling, of course.
The other thing that’s worth noting about all that spam is that it never ceases to amaze me what a good job of spam-detection the Akismet plugin for WordPress does. If you have a WordPress blog and don’t use it, you should. I’ve never yet seen it guess wrong — not just on this blog, but on any blog I’ve ever managed. (And it’s not only available for WordPress, but also for lots of other platforms including Drupal and Joomla.). Because of the amazing wizardry of Akismet, none of you has ever had to see a single one of this blog’s spam comments.
Don’t worry, though. If I find any more gems like “You are my inhalation,” I’ll be sure to share.
I’ll see your inhalation, and I’ll raise you an aspiration: “This web site is my aspiration.” Aw, so suhweeet.
I get at least ten times as many spam comments as regular comments. Thanks to Akismet I can delete them all in one click. What amazes me is that they’re so obviously spam and so blatantly unrelated to anything I ever write about, but there must be money in the game for them to keep doing it. I definitely get more now than I used to, so just wait. ;-)