If Nelson Rockefeller were alive today he'd be seeing his saying, "I'd rather reap 1% from 100 men's efforts rather than 100% of my own" being put to good use. I always was amazed at the economics of scale, and how getting a very tiny amount of effort out of each webpage visitor often translates into millions of dollars for large sites. This principle, much like the 80/20 principle discussed in "The Four Hour Work Week", is widespread in its online applications.

Yet he'd also be seeing it put to bad use, through a website section no one would have dreamed of abusing ten years ago: comments.

Yes, comment sections have actually been used to put Russian malware sites at the top of Google's rankings with thousands of harmless-looking holiday greetings leading back to these sites. Google's ranking policies have been changed to prevent this, but trolls across the world are still constantly blanketing blogs with nonsensical comments. Millions of these comments are deleted daily, but a few thousand manage to make it through. This article is about one comment FIVE THOUSAND people let through!

What was its secret? Was it exceptionally nice? Did it say something funny? No, but here's what it did have: universal reach.

I recently received this certain comment from one “forex account” with a Gmail address. Nothing out of the ordinary, and the wording was very nice as well: “Excellent post. What CMS (content management system) do you use in your blog?”

On the surface, it looked like a heartfelt, sincere, spur-of-the-moment comment. But let’s try a little exercise. Open another window, please, and go to Google.com. Using quotes, type in “Excellent post. What CMS". Hit “Search” at the top.

Look at that. Over 5000 blogs from all walks of life, and over 5000 webmasters let that comment through. Many have responded to it as well! I'm flabbergasted, actually. Two weeks ago there were just 1100 results. Some people probably allowed that comment to go through twice or more. And somewhere, some forex guy is draining a sizeable chunk of web traffic from these blogs to his soft-sell video on YouTube. If you see a ton of search results showing the same canned comment, don’t approve it!

So while I won’t allow this canned praise on any of my blogs, I’m going to settle for a small pat on the back from myself: I’m apparently either smarter or more vigilant than over 5000 other bloggers.

Come join the club! And leave an original comment, I'll be Googling it!

Lionel Houde publishes http://webmasterdiy.info.