Sorry, that's what I mean. Captcha programs are ineffective much of the time against Xrumer. For other software there's services such as decaptcha, beatcaptcha, etc.. some services read the screen and take their best guess, some use actual people in what I can only imagine are sweatshops to enter captchas manually for you, but Xrumer doesn't need that stuff. It's smart, it learns... and many who use it combine it's knowledge with files so that it learns even more.

That's what I mean, the only way to stay ahead of it is your own personalized captchas (ones that alternate).

I would place my money on Xrumer and other such software... we get it loads too.

Some might even be hack attempts with SQL injection but probably not too often.

Xrumer is pretty good at beating captcha's (I've heard lol ;p), so you'll need to define your own actual questions if you want to stop it... i.e. "What colour the sky?" is one, but it's learnt that and others like it, so you need more personalized ones. The best are "What is the first word on the homepage of this site?" as of course it can't guess that, and it can't follow the instructions to go find out

I'd check it with some other software too... i.e. Raven Tools free trial or something, that will tell you if there's canonicalization problems... of course I'm not advocating Raven Tools over SEOmoz tools (I'm a member here and not there for good reasons), I just think best to try a few different tests before deciding if it's a problem. There might just be an issue with the SEOmoz campaign tool for the moment, which I'm sure they'll fix as soon as they realise.

Hey, aren't you the tutor I had in my SEC usability course?

There can be massive negative effects.

1. You'll annoy a lot of blog owners, some will report you for spam

2. You'll get tonnes of worthless links from worthless blogs filled with other spammers, therefore connecting yourself to some iffy neighbourhoods

3. You'll end up with lots of links that have your same anchor text keywords in from one link type... blogs. This will look unnatural for your link profile

My view: It used to work, not so much anymore... might still work a little but there are risks, especially to your brand.

Panda seems to have diminished even more the value of low quality links, and low quality links is what you'll get with auto linking software. This brings down the benefits while the risks stay the same.