So yesterday I got a comment on an older entry of mine. The comment read, “This wonderful site is worth dropping a line in your guestbook to say thanks!” How nice, I thought to myself. How sweet to send me a note like that… But then I noticed the name of the person who had left the comment – Mr http://www.e-flight.biz. How nice. How… blatant…
So clearly this company is spamming my comments. That much seems clear. Probably they’re after a little extra Google page-rank of some kind – they’re clearly trying to dredge a little traffic their way, get some page impressions, make a little money. That’s all fine, of course – we all have to make a living – but it seems to me that I shouldn’t really be just expected to help them make that living. It seems odd that they should be trying to make money by exploiting the traffic and reputation of my site. I should have a say, surely? I should be asked? Even if – unsurprisingly – the answer would certainly be, “No”.
So I’ve done some research, and it turns out that http://www.e-flight.biz (note that I haven’t linked to them yet) has a bit of a habit of spamming other sites. A quick search on Google finds 591 links to their site, pretty much all of them on guestbooks. But those 591 links don’t seem to be enough. That’s the only reason I can find from moving from guestbooks to sticking adverts in the comments sections of weblogs. Do they not think I’ll mind? Do they not think I’ll object to the precendent they’re trying to set?
So the question is, how do we stop them spamming all of our sites? What’s the best approach? What’s the best way to compensate for every frustrating piece of false advertising they stick on someone else’s online home? What’s the best way to communicate that e-flight.biz spends its time with unethical advertising and unsolicited spam and are therefore untrustworthy? Has anyone got any ideas?