Is this a legit blog comment, or comment spam?

Most likely, it's comment spam.

As it turns out, I have a splendid example of just this sort of thing that was left here on my Weblog last night. The discussion is about You can sell Ad space on your Web site and one of the different methods of selling ads that I mention in the article is Google's AdSense program.

The article was posted to the blog quite a while ago, and it ends with the comment:

"So if you have a nice Web site, have good pagerank, and would like to explore the possibility of selling your own ad space without having to fuss with finding buyers, LinkAdage could be an excellent solution for you. I recommend it."

The comment left last night was:

Ad space has become the most common online product with Google Adsense, many people who had hard time with selling their own online products, succeeded to accomplish profits they were looking for by selling spaces on their websites for advertisement, mostly by Google Adsense program.

It kind of makes sense, but it also kind of doesn't make sense. And why would this article that doesn't see particularly a lot of traffic suddenly garner this semi-incoherent message?

The solution can be found by looking at what the person put in the "name" field:

As you can see from this snapshot of the administrative backend area, the user specified a "webmaster" email address, but instead of an actual name, they used Builder as their name and included a link to their site, serioussoft.com as the URL.

Their thinking is that my weblog will then have an unobtrusive link to their site that has the word "Builder" as its hypertext, reinforcing and helping their site rank higher for people who search for "builder" on Google or similar.

This won't work, however, because like most weblogs, Ask Dave Taylor is configured to use the rel=nofollow option on links in comments, which tells search engines to ignore that link and not give it any credit. So it's basically wasted effort on their part.

And, yes, if you're seeing comments of a similar nature, it's probably also comment spam and I'd suggest you delete it, or, if you're a bit mischievous, simply delete the URL from the comment so that it doesn't point anywhere, but still exists.

Me? I'm going to leave this comment so you can flip over to that page and see it intact, but you and I now both know that it won't help this person one iota with their search engine rankings.