If you see this text on your website or blog: “Today, I went to the beach with my children. I found a sea shell and gave it to my 4 year old daughter and said “You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear.” She placed the shell to her ear and screamed. There was a hermit crab inside and it pinched her ear. She never wants to go back! LoL I know this is entirely off topic but I had to tell someone!” ..your site has just been co-opted by a comment spammer.

But you’re in good company. In fact, company which numbers over 4million!

Yes, this particular blog spam comment has been posted over 4 million times across the Internet, on sites around the world (including Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, the U.S. and Australia), and ranging from personal sites to major organization sites such as the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology.

So why would someone post a seemingly innocent, and sweet, text, that may not even have anything to do with the post to which it was appended?

The secret is in the URL that the comment poster includes in the URL area. They are creating a link to whatever site that leads to – and more likely than not they have been paid by the owner of that URL and website to create those links.

(For a list of URLs that have been posted or sent in spam check out the URIBL.

So if you see this text in a comment on a site you are visiting, don’t bother replying to it, and don’t visit their link.

And if this text appears as a comment on a site that you admin, by all means delete it.