What, exactly, are some of these trying to achieve? I run a small website with a comment system. At the moment its being targeted by a spambot which is doing things like (attempting to) link to, say, nwfyxlruchz.com with the text "nwfyxlruchz". i could understand if they were linking with some meaningful text, either to directly gain visitors or to influence search rankings, but who cares if you're the #1 google result for "nwfyxlruchz"?

or am i looking at it wrong and they're just testing the waters? using a nonsensical term on a small scale to see if it works, before they bring out the big guns?

I don't think that PageRank cares about context, number of links is all that matters. You put all the keywords in your own page.

But remember that spammers/skiddie don't always make sense, thy're just using tools they got/bought from other clueless h4X0rs.