Comment spammers are often trying to improve their site’s organic search ranking by creating dubious inbound links to their site. Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/11/hard-facts-about-comment-spam.html
SEO Monopoly is one of the latest most talked about forms of SEO.