Spam is one of the biggest problems with the web at the moment and, despite countless efforts and measures, it's unlikely to go away any time soon. Google has several way of countering spam, be it in Gmail or in the web at large, which it claims are pretty good at making these methods pretty useless, though, this doesn't seem to faze most spammers. In a recent blog post, it's focusing on comment spam, specifically on what it does to tackle the problem and what webmasters can do to prevent them. It's not exactly groundbreaking, but there are a couple of useful tips in there.

Google starts off by appealing to the spammer's conscience with things like: “abusing comment fields of innocent sites is a bad and risky way of getting links to your site.” There's nothing wrong with that sentence, in fact, it's entirely true. But the morality of the thing insn't likely to stop anyone from doing it. Google also tries to make the case that original content is the way to go and that a little patience and a lot of hard work will pay off with nice, clean and natural ranking.

This is all great if you're talking to a five-year old, but the “do the right thing” and “work hard and one day ...” arguments are perhaps lost on the people Google is trying to reach. Fortunately, Google has some solid arguments as well, more often than not, spammy links won't help your ranking and the algorithm is smart enough to know when you are trying to 'work it'.

“At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links. Think of all the more productive things one could do with that time and energy that would provide much more value for one's site in the long run,” Adel Saoud and Paolo Petrolini write. That's the official version anyway, but the fact is, if spam didn't work, nobody would do it. Of course, Google is not going after the hardcore, botnet-wielding spammer with this post but rather after the guy trying to build up his site in the rankings to make a couple more bucks from AdSense so maybe it will make a few people think twice if spamming is the way to go.