Every once in a while, I have to sift through the spam filters here for my Creative Weblogging blogs and my other blogs. I occasionally run across these what appear to be nonsensical comments that, at least to me, look like spam. Yet there's no spammy URL to go with it.

The folks at defensio provide an explanation for this strange phenomenon: spammers are trying to get whitelisted in order to be able to send spam later or to poison the spam filters to allow certain words.

Both of those sound like plausible explanations to be, but I tend to go with the most simplistic answer: because they can.