Tonight, the first real blow against comment spammers was struck as the major search engines and blog software companies teamed together to fight comment spam on blogs. As most of us know from annoying past experiences, comment spammers use blogs to “up” their rankings in the search engines. By leaving numerous link-filled (and irrelevant) comments on blogs, spammer-supported sites gain status in the search results. The more links — and the more victimized blogs — the better. From their perspective, that is.
But not anymore.
Google Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s MSN division, Yahoo Inc. and Six Apart Ltd. announced late Tuesday that they are supporting a tag called “nofollow” to exclude links in blog comments from search-engine crawlers and to prevent spam posts from influencing search rankings. [...]
“From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank Web sites in our search results,” the posting said. “This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks and referrer lists.”
There’s more on Google’s blog about the new link attribute, and a new WordPress “No Follow” plug-in for those of us smart enough to use WP.
UPDATE: After a lot of thought, I’ve elected not to install this plug-in yet. I like that non-spammer commenters’ links get counted in their favor when Google indexes my site… which is pretty darned often, I might add. If that means continuing to delete comments left by spammers until this plug-in is improved — or until WP incorporates code exempting blogs in my links list from the rel=”nofollow” — so be it.
Tuesday, January 18th, 2005, 11:53 pm | 
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January 19, 2005 at 12:08 am
Gulp. Am moving to MT, which I hear is spammer hell. Razib at Gene Expression uses Haloscan on MT just to keep comment spammers from taking out his server.
January 19, 2005 at 8:52 am
I looked into this plugin, I’m not a fan of this one. (I’ve pretty much stopped all spam from appearing on my WP site, for now) So I DO want linkage tracking on those links that ARE put in my comments.
I’ll pass on this one, but I think I have some plans for this new rel tag… this is good information to have.
January 19, 2005 at 10:50 am
Or you could do what we did and use forums… sure, they require a valid e-mail address to register, and you have to click a confirmation link in your e-mail, but you can set your forum software so you don’t need to collect any personally-identifiable information.
We haven’t gotten any spam yet. Of course, we also only have 20 registered users, but hey, we’re new.
I also like forums because they’re easier to discuss things in. But that’s just me.
January 19, 2005 at 3:39 pm
To be honest, I’m not a terribly big fan of forums. I use them on my hosting site for customer service issues, but for blogging I prefer linear comments – and trackbacks – laid out under the pertinent post.
January 19, 2005 at 5:44 pm
Kate, you left a comment on my blog with a link, but looking at that page, there are so many discussions about different methods of blocking spam, I wasn’t sure which one in particular you were referring.
So…is it back to the blacklist methodology?
thanks,
MB
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