Spam alert for ad-free blogs - how to prevent it?

I was a bit peeved today to get a comment on my Lisbon Treaty blog post which I wasn't able to verify as a genuine blogger before posting the comment to my blog. When I did check I discovered the person's name - which looked like a genuine name - actually linked me to a vacation rental website in Florida.

Now that is a bit devious and I didn't like it so I made a footnote on my comments that I would have to enable comment moderation. Of course when I checked my settings I already had enabled comment moderation and also word verification. Apologies to anyone who was puzzled by my comment.

So I guess it was a genuine person not an automated response - but I didn't think it fair to link to a commercial website. It happened before - someone commented on my mugs from Barcelona post and when I clicked it was a private Blogger site but there was a link at the end of the post comment to a commercial site selling electronic goods.

That's all -my gripe of the day, just to warn people out there that this is going on, in case it happens to you. Just reject these when they occur. Here is a piece on the rise of blog comment spam; it seems to be ubiquitous.

I don't try to earn cash from my blog - that's why it's ad-free. Nor am I advocating censorship but I blog for fun, and don't want to get spammed!