I monitor all comments before allowing them to be posted. Basically, if you have a sketchy looking URL, or if your comment is not related at all to the post, it won’t get through.

So far, I’ve gotten hundreds of comments, but I haven’t had a single comment I’m 100% sure is legitimate. About a dozen or so have been vague praise which didn’t include any URLs or other product endorsements. I let these through… until I noticed a strange trend:

Besides the fact that it’s all obviously non-native English (which is fine, I’d expect some language learners to be on a linguistics blog)… All four of these comments have user names having to do with cleaning, particularly carpet cleaning. Of all the things for spammers to do, why this? Why carpets?

(Note: after this screenshot, I removed these comments because I decided they were spam).