Having a blog means that you have to maintain it and write entries on a regular basis. This is the purpose of having a blog - sharing our thoughts and experiences with everyone. What you dont think about when creating a blog is the amount of time you use just removing rubbish comments. People who might call themselves SEO gurus because they provide traffic to various sites by posting comments in blogs - our blog. For those of you who dont know how this works here is a quick explanation:

1. The main moneymaker on the internet is to have visitors on your website click your ads (e.g. google adsense) - and yes we get money if you push the ones on our blog too.
2. Statistics show that only a small percentage of the visitors who visits your site click on the ads (i think we made 0.01$ the last month) - its around 5% as i remember
3. It you want more traffic you must rank high on google searches (if e.g. you search google for AOC UI we are 4th i think) - the majority of clicks on a single google search are divided between the 2-3 first entries in the search result.
4. Here comes the tricky part, and the question for one million dollar - how do you rank higher on google searches then? Well, this is where the SEO business work and do their thing. The more link on the internet that point to your site the higher your website ranks. And if your can point to your website with words that you would like your site to be associated with then it has even more value.

Now go and look at some of our comments, they are spam comments to us, we do not want to promote some obscure weight loss program (as some of them advertise for). As a software developer I am amazed that it seems that all these seems to be created by hand, we have 2 different spam filters and they catch around 60% of the spam comments (I suspect that these are the auto generated ones) - this means that there are some people out there who are doing this manually (this amazes me even more, that anyone would even bother doing this). Another thing that bothers/amazes me is how on earth they find the blogs on which they want to place their links - do they scan the internet with some kind of robot? I suspect even more that they do this manually too.

After having considered the amount of manually labor involved in writing spam comments on our blog I feel some kind of admiration for their persistence and involvement. I personally think that a lot of this manual labor originate in 3rd world countries where the wage it considerable lower than in the western part of europe (where I live). Maybe im even helping out by letting these spammers spam my blog with rubbish comments! Maybe im doing a good deed by ensuring that the weak economy in 3rd world countries are supplied with the value of putting links on our blog - well im starting to feel like a true humanitarian.

Unfortunately (for the spammers) we are trying to serve information to readers and a lot of that information comes through the comments in our blog - so although i just had a moment of feeling like a true humanitarian - we are removing all comments that looks like spam and every time we curse the bloody spammers to hell where they belong!!!

I wonder how much a single link on our site is worth in visitors and finally in cool cash!