A company called Busby Web Solutions has been awarding competitors of "SEO contests", which I'm guessing promotes the practice of posting web content to experiment with the SEO performance of keywords and markup. The catch is that this has equated to essentially spamming non-participating web communities with junk posts in comments, etc.

We, the non-competitors, have been very fortunate that some such tests have been self-labeled with "Busby SEO Test" in the author's name. This could be simply be one competitor, but over the last month I have received about 20 comments posts on my blog consisting of variations of the text, "Thank you for sharing your article about {blog entry title}". I have modified my blog's instance of BlogEngine.net to filter out these Busby tests by looking for "Busby" in the author name. Needless to say, Busby Web Solutions is not making a very good name for itself. Not at all.

While there has not been a lot of damage done--nothing like the pornography posts that spammers are posting on phpBB forums everywhere--I still think that any automated junk posts should be dealt with. Typical CAPTCHA is a pain in the rear for users. This is an issue that will never die.