Why Do Blog Spammers Waste Their Time?

Occasionally one of my blogs will be bombarded by comments and trackbacks from someone looking for free linkbacks. They will make posts that have no relationship at all to the subject matter of the blog, and often they are quotations or pearls of wisdom like

"Life goes on no matter what we do or say."

Messages like this indicate that your typical spammer is not only being deceptive, but is also pretty stupid to boot. Anybody with half a brain would realize that you could create a generic "comment" that would sound relevant to almost any blog post, and would not be immediately rejected by the blogmaster. For example...

"Good point. This is a very interesting topic and I hope you write more about it in the future."

or

"I really found your post interesting. I'll watch for more in the future."

or even

"Thanks for the insight. Homer Simpson made a similar point in the famous ice cream cone episode."

But no. Spammers start out with a mental deficit, and it is unlikely that they will actually do something that makes sense. Invariably blog spam comments are planted by poker, gambling, or porn sites. And also invariably they are new sites with no history, traffic, Alexa rating, or PR. Somebody has told these webmasters (I use the term lightly) that there is traffic and ranking to be gained by spamming blogs with meaningless comments, and so they dutifully spam blogs.

It is pretty amazing to me that people actually do this. They must not be aware that most, if not all, blogging software comes with anti-spam features that allow you to filter out posts and comments like these. As soon as they are entered, an email message is sent to the blogmaster and the comment or backtrack is dealt with. Any serious blogger will watch his or her comments carefully. And there is no point in having comments in non-serious blogs. So it is a pointless exercise.

What's worse for the offending parties is that they get put on a blacklist that gets referenced by all the major blogging sites, and to which most bloggers will be connected by default. So now "http://genaholincorporated.com", a poker site which has been spamming a few of my blogs over the last couple of days, is blacklisted and on the master list of banned keywords. It is right there along with all the standard XXX, penis enlargement and "cheap drugs" keywords. Nice company to be in...

This is really no different from other types of spam such as mass email, FFA link/classified ad sites, traffic exchanges or "I'll give you 10,000 hits for $10". They are all attempts to get something for nothing. They are all examples of how playing a "numbers game" can sound good in theory, but be completely pointless in reality.

Why don't these people spend their time doing something more useful? I guess that would be too much to ask.