I was reading an acquaintance’s freshly pressed blog the other day, and noticed they had lots of comments on their posts – even though there were only a few posts and the blog hadn’t been going that long.

My first thought – “Way to go! See this blogging thing really pays off”
and then I actually read the comments.

Along the lines of

“Hello ! this is a very great website here and I just wanted to comment & say that you’ve done an wonderful job here!”

“Excellent read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. And he just bought me lunch as I found it for him smile So let me rephrase that: Thanks for lunch!”

Of course, most would immediately recognize these comments as spam, especially if you take a second to notice the links of the author  (pharmaceuticals and their ilk).  However, I was quite surprised to see that this blogger was oblivious to their origins and was quaintly replying back things like “Thanks so much…etc”.

I’m not trying to make fun of this newbie. It opened my eyes to the fact these types of deceptions are insidious, and can be less obvious to the newbie.

The bottom line,  if you are brand new to the “blogosphere” is check the links, install a good anti-spam plug-in (Aksimet etc), and, of course, as elsewhere, if it seems to good to be true…

N.B. Of course this blog is quite freshly pressed too!  If I had a dime for every abandoned blog I started….