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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

No, I don't get it.

In what way it it better for a spammer to post a scout message and then check whether the scout message appears before posting the spam, than simply posting a spam message and seeing of the spam appears?

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Possibly if the person doing it is selling addresses to spammers, rather than doing the spamming themselves?

Posting 1 comment on 10,000 sites to see which are vulnerable lets you concentrate the bulk of your efforts on the best targets. There's no URL in the post which may mean they are creating a list to hand-spam later on. It's a lot harder for filters to catch hand written text and if a random comment gets through the likelihood that a hand written one will is high.

So maybe out of 10,000 sites they find 1,000 that are good targets and then have their third-world employees go to town working at 10x the rate. Not a bad return.

It's sort of like burglars cruising through a neighborhood on multiple nights to see who has the lights off.

I doubt any have real people doing the submissions, it's automated. It would make sense to find which one's are vulnerable, but they wouldn't need to test with a fake spam post, they'd test with a real one and check their backlinks (yahoo site explorer for example).

I disagree. Those are real people who do that kind of work. When I was looking for online work at sites like getafreelancer or rentacoder there usually were tons of job offers regarding forum posts/blog comments. Rarely labeled as forum/blog spam but often meaning that. Here's a typical (current) job offer for forum posts: http://is.gd/c3dIo (This is not intended as advertising but only to provide an impression of such a job offer and as evidence that such job offers actually do exist and are common, depending on where you look.)

In this particular job, they offer $20 for 400 posts (or 2000 replies). Most often, one condition of posting such stuff is that it is at least unique, "original work" or would "pass copyscape".

So, there seem to be people who actually do this kind of job manually.

Exactly, real people are hired to generate backlinks via blog comments. I consider it spam, but since the goal is to make a relevant comment, that's debatable. The example given in this post however, is automated. You don't hire people to write unique content and have them list keywords. That's the type of spam I'm referring to as automated.

That's a really good point, I agree with you. Why not just post the spam in the first place. But honestly this was the best reason I could think up. Keyword spamming only helps me out, in terms of search engine ranking; Unless they're trying to get my blog blacklisted, which I don't see any point to either.

If they know which blogs get the best search results, they can focus their efforts on spamming those blogs. Of course, that would mean the gibberish they post would have to actually contain a search query they want to optimize for.

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