IIS Aid

I have noticed recently on a few popular forums I post on that there are new users whose only contribution is to post comments to questions that link back to content on external sites which are generally infomercial style sites with a handful of carefully targeted pages to give them a more authentic feel. So long as the linked content is relevant and of good quality I suppose there is no real problem with this, however I find myself being in two minds of the legitimacy of this practice. This is somewhat hypocritical of me as I tend to do a similar thing (post links back to my content when relevant), but there are three distinct differences.

1) If I link to my content I ensure it is a relevant topic, and I participate in all threads that are of interest to me rather than just cherry picking the threads that enable me to post relevant links back to my site. I.e. I have an interest in finding a solution to the problem the user has posted, and am not participating simply for self-gain.

2) I create content that is of interest to me, and not because it is of maximum marketability. In most cases I create content that is related to a problem that I have myself very recently encounted. I post this not only as a reference for myself should I encounter it again, but to also hopefully aid other finding themselves in the same situation. That is why you'll find some of my content has 80,000 reads while others only have 80.

3) I never post comments with links back to my site while trying to give the impression I am not the owner of the site. There is one forum I use quite a bit that has had one particular new user who is always posting things like "try these instructions out, they really helped me" to give the impression that they are a regular joe user who has come across the same issue, and used the linked content to solve the problem. When all the posts from this user uses the same language structure, are only posted for particular topics and all link back to the same site it is pretty obvious that they are not all that meets the eye.

I suppose my concern is that while at face level the linked content in these posts look relevant and generally of reasonable quality, it really is IMHO an evolved level of spam. Something that generally gets under the radar of traditional spam filters such as Captcha and Akismet, but at the end of the day is still a veiled advertisement. My concern with this is that sites that allow these sorts of posts may have their reputation tainted, and in the end could result in the information on those sites being less respected. I guess I feel these user/posts just detract from the feeling of community in these forums where people help each other out of a genuine intent rather than to promote your own site for financial gain. This obviously is just my 2 cents, and I would love to hear what other people think.