Would that be Sauber.net? Shame there's nothing that can be done to out them. Nothing that I know of, I should say.

There is nothing on their site about 'search engine optomisation' so i doubt it is anything to do with them.

I have no idea why people bother any more...

Google stopped using blog comments for back-linking a fair while back...

Ugh, i used to get that when i had a website a while back. I don't get it - what a way to try to improve ratings!! Cheers, by the way, 'cause i've really enjoyed reading your blog since i got the book. It's good stuff and i think it's a good thing to be doing :)

That's quite ironic considering "sauber" is the German word for "clean".

It is antisocial. This is your personal website, not an advertising forum. Bah.

*offers V14GR4 and Ci4l1s @ lo lo prices!*

I wish to purchase your V14GR4 and Ci4l1s @ lo lo prices, where should I send the cheque?
(seriously; somebody must!)

I'm not sure what you mean, so I hope it's nothing that I've done before!

I hope if I ever did something unacceptable in blog land that someone would point it out before I became a re-offender!

Someone pays you money to go to as many blogs as you can (preferably high-readership ones) and leave comments advertising a product/service/website etc. Usually they're completely irrelevant to the theme of the post and the combination of advertising, irrelevancy, and the fact that the person commenting is making no effort to become part of the "community" makes it particularly annoying to the blog owner, and the regular readers.

Imagine a spam email copied and pasted and posted into the comments section of a blog rather than being in your email inbox.

(Erm, you don't need high readership. I have Akismet trapping spam on my blog, so I can see what goes through if I want, and the crap to real ratio is about thirty to one.)

I get those on my blog too and delete them immediately. Lately they've been hiding the links in punctuation marks, like a comma will be a link.

The thing I don't understand is if that really helps them. I thought Google put rel=nofollow stuff in all links in a comment so that it would ignore them when calculating page rank.

Google doesn't put anything in other sites blog posts - it's down to the software your blog is running on.

If you look here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.htmlYou'll find a nice explanation and a list of software that uses this ferature.

And if you look at the source for this post, you'll be able to see whether it's worked or not...

I recently was offered a job doing that. It's true I'm broke, but I hesitated, since I thought it sounded antisocial. Hearing the tone of these comments, I'm glad I turned it down.

I get a lot of these on a forum which I administer - people register and make one post full of links.
What they don't seem to realise is that we have an approvals plug-in, by which posts or users have to be approved before their posts become visible to non-admins. All this stuff therefore gets deleted, the offending users deleted and their IP address barred.
As batsgirl noted above, Real People (TM) are now employed to post this sort of cr@p, now that the spam-bots have been countered with visual confirmation widgets and the like.

Tom, do you have access to his IP address?

There are a number of things that you may be able to do. Firstly, does blogware allow you to allow/restrict access to certain IP addresses? Some blogging software does, so I'm not sure if blogware is one of them.

Secondly, if you can work out who his ISP is (BT, Tiscali, etc), you can probably report him. Most ISPs look unfavourably at anybody sending out spam of any form (be it comment spam or email spam).

Regards
Nick
http://nickhough.blogspot.com

Nick,
Blogware does allow IP addresses to be blocked, and I've done that. At the moment I'm trying to get all my trackbacks deleted as I used to show them in older posts.

I also discovered that I'm missing some of my earlier posts - which may need investigating.

Yeah, trackbacks are a really sneaky way of advertising. Can you not take the entire of the trackback code out of the standard template? The problem, as far as I understand it, is that the trackbacks aren't stored as part of your blog. When the blog is published, it does a query to check who and from where people are linking to you. Hence, without removing the link of their side, you can't get rid of the actual link. The best you can do is stop them being displayed...

Erm, I can't be of much help with your earlier posts!

Regards
Nick
http://nickhough.blogspot.com

There's a bloody cunning idea! I remove the code that runs if I allow trackbacks and they all stop showing up.

Sir, I thank you!

-Tom

No problem! Glad to have been of service!

Regards
Nick
http://nickhough.blogspot.com

Just did a quick hunt and the Internet Archive only goes back to a page saved on Feb 09 2004 - http://www.archive.org/index.php - I have no idea of blogware's "no robots" policy though, which affects what got left off that cached page, but there may be some useful/salvageable stuff there - though obviously new readers won't find it unless they go hunting.

The old posts have all popped back - I guess that something went 'temporarily screwy' up at the hosters end and that they have now fixed it.

Regarding "real people" spamming - I've just had a 419 e-mail to an e-mail addy I only used for this site (I have an ISP that allows basically "anyname@yourpart.isp.com") which would indicate real people - and I use the term "real" VERY loosely - are now bothering to come on here and use the "Profile" link.

I know there's nothing anyone can do about that, spam's a fact of life, but just thought I'd mention it to point out to anyone that next time you hate your job, just be glad you're NOT a human spam butt-monkey....