Web Comments is a slick Firefox extension showing blog backlinks to the website you're viewing. It was only a short time before splogs started linking to popular websites so that they'll show up in Web Comments. At Google I see backlinks from a religious apologist, an AdSense site that clumsily scrapes news with no theme that I can detect and another scraper AdSense site with VOIP advertising.

Yahoo has several links from SEO sites. They're not talking about Yahoo; I believe they're linking to Yahoo purely for the purpose of getting seen in Web Comments. In this image, I've highlighted the spammy backlinks.


I'm seeing similar results at other popular websites. Web Comments is enabling a new kind of spamvertising. It's a kind of site-specific AdWords campaign except you don't pay for the clicks. It's kind of ironic that Google is the company that created and promoted this extension.