An interesting discussion about a new-ish class of spam comments – conversational spam – is underway on the site of Sig Figs regular tech writer Wayne Smallman. He suggests that the kind of manual spam that attempts to engage a blogger in some kind of conversation and so obfuscate its true purpose of getting a free link is becoming more prevalent. More to the point the Akismet spam filter I’ve mentioned previously does not always catch such comments because they look at first glance to be genuine.

All that aside, such troubles are almost always worthy of their own post to alert other bloggers to the problem and to expand on how we can actually turn the tables on the spammers and make their efforts work for us. There is certainly value to be added to a blog by discussing such matters.

However, you have to avoid duplicating any content that’s been spammed elsewhere in any such a write-up. You also have to take care not to use any seriously spammy SEO taboo words. There’s also the issue mentioned by web development blogger Heidi Cool that writing about spam might actually attract spammers if you use their keywords in your text.

That said, 90% of the spam I get is of the one-word type all of which is caught by Akismet. No one rose the bait in my post entitled Send Us Your Spam) I suppose writing about spam might shift that ratio slightly, but if the post in question helps fellow bloggers then that’s a price worth paying.

One thing to remember though is that if you do use a few of the keywords coming in your spam folder but in a legitimate blog post, then you could be taking advantage of any contextual advertising running on your site, which could help your blog’s monetization efforts. In other words exploiting the spam you receive could lead to a profit for your blog.