I really love a good mystery! In my last post Desperate? I talked about the apparent spamming of my (and others’) blog comments by Microsoft. Cow reader Damned Skeptic took me to task about this conclusion, and I defended my logic in the Comments of that post.

In a nutshell, what I said was that given that 99.9% of all the comment spam I get is about link hoarding, what evidence is there that the Bing (and also Yahoo) links were not cut from the same cloth? To me it looks like someone is trying to get some link action happening for those sites.

Except…

This morning I was inundated with a whole lot of spam such as this one from ‘Datherine’:

Here’s where Datherine is linking:

Now, is that not totally bizarre? Firstly, I will acquiesce: it’s fairly conclusive evidence that my first hypothesis was incorrect. I doubt that ALL the search engines are attempting to up their ranking like this. That would just be ridiculous. But what IS going on, then?

One thing that I can tell you is that Akismet (my spam filter) is on top of this – look at the stuff that was scooped up overnight:

There were dozens like this. These, of course, are all generated by bots and are easy to screen, unlike the spumans I mentioned yesterday. But look at those links! Way to add some pile carpet to the noise floor. Why would anyone want to generate lots of links to just any search engine? What are we seeing here? Are the big search engines involved in some kind of clandestine link deluge war? Is there any relevance in the fact that all the attempted links from yesterday and the day before were exclusively Bing and Yahoo, and this morning, for the first time, it’s Google? Wow.

Another thing I can tell you is that this spam was targeting my most visited pages, such as the FAQ, the Rasputin contests and some of my Peter Popoff posts. There is definitely some method behind this madness…