Comment spamming is bad, shilling is worse. Why? Because automated filters detect 99% of comment spam. The spam filter here on The Virtual Handshake Blog has caught over 750,000 spam comments in the past couple of years.

But shilling… shilling is hard to detect and often goes unnoticed the first or second time. Someone leaves a comment… a decent, on-topic comment… but then at the end throws in the mention of some product or person that has little, if anything, to do with the post on which they’re commenting.

And then you get a second post a week later from a different person that follows the same pattern. Maybe they really are just raving fans of some new product that you’re not "in the know" about.

But then you get a third post another week later, and you start noticing little things like the fact that all of the commenters have @Yahoo.com addresses. Maybe you investigate a little bit further and find that there’s a similar pattern on other web sites. Sooner or later you realize that you’ve been spammed all along and didn’t even notice it. And unlike the 750,000 comments that got automatically deleted, these three really tick you off. Why? Because you’ve been deceived.

What’s even worse is when you find out that the person behind it all touts themselves as an internet marketing expert.

Want to hear the whole story? Check out James D. Brausch, Glyphius and Shilling.