The cackhandedness of autospam hasn’t got any better has it? Here’s something I found on Vanity Fair (and no – you may not ask why I was reading it!) It’s fantastically stupid on many levels – and this screencap is only about half of the actual ‘comment’.

• First link first: We get asked a lot about this but it’s something we’ve extensively tested. If you have two links on the same page using different anchor text  to point to the same target URL, then Google only passes keyword relevancy for the first one. Something to think about if you’re writing a blog post for someone and are thinking of putting two different anchor text links in it. In this piece of inane shit, there are around 43,433 links on different anchor text that are entirely wasted.
• It’s Vanity Bloody Fair! Trying to spam a major media brand like this is like playing chicken with Walter Sobchak. The people behind Vanity Fair are Condé Nast – one of the most venerable publishing brands in the world with some incredibly high profile publications in their portfolio. This is the kind of company being wooed by high level advertisers and potentially schmoozing with the like of, say, Google on many fronts. You want to run the risk of pissing those guys off? Best of luck on the dole queue.
• It’s not even relevant: The spam in this case is for various items of fashionable apparel. And it’s on Vanity Fair – a huge name in fashion media. Great! Only it’s been dumped on a page with no relevance to fashion. They could have chosen any one of a million posts on this site and had a bit of content relevancy but instead people have to figure out what connection venerable film producer Jerry Weintraub has to particular brands of handbag.
• The comments are brought in with Ajax. This means they’re not even indexed by Google. Try viewing the page without Javascript turned on to see it in action. Ergo, no link juice. A few seconds of testing could avoid this.
• It’s so obvious it makes you shit yourself.  Even if it worked as an SEO tool – which it doesn’t – there is still a commercial possibility in a comment link. Done correctly on a relevant post on a high traffic site could send you potential customers or generate further natural links. But seriously… who’s going to click one of these links? Only a moron. And morons are probably not your target market. And of course, it’s sheer obviousness is the kind of thing that makes a peeved site owner hotfoot it over to Google to report you for buying links – which even if it doesn’t work is just generally bad Karma.

If someone is doing this kind of thing on your behalf… stop them. Like yesterday.