[crashryan]

Can someone with a greater knowledge of Internet mechanics than I have (which means almost everybody) explain what benefit spammers get from posting generic comments on sites like ours? I understand the adverts-pretending-to-be-comments (like the recent Fidget Spinner posting). I understand a generic comment followed by an unconnected ad ("Your site is most enlightening. Great buys on trampolines at..."). But what's the point in vague, mostly ungrammatical, platitudes posted without a link? Does a successful post somehow open a back door to be used for nefarious purposes? Or what?

[MarkWarner]

Ok well they can just be a test. To know that the site is ready to be used at some point.

Putting in links is not necessarily to get traffic. The idea is to get lots of links pointing to your spammy page, which makes Google think that you are the best around ... which then pushes you up the rankings to first place and you get lots of hits when people do a search. In reality it doesn't really work and if it does it is short term .. BUT it might affect the host site detrimentally. As it could be a signal of a site/forum riddled with spam which is not a good user experience.

Our forum uses the "nofollow" tag which means we are telling search engines here is a  link BUT we are not vouching for it and don't blame us if it is rubbish. So it's neutral