molly.com
Wednesday 19 January 2005
comment spam relief from Google
I LOVE GOOGLE for many reasons, and here’s one more. Google has implemented a simple and lovely means of ensuring that comment spam has no influence on ranking.
The method is easy-breezy. Any hyperlink that has an attribute of rel="nofollow" won’t get credit in the ranking algorithm. It doesn’t impact the blog’s rank, and Google has some recommendations about how this approach can be best used to not impact your blog but definitely muck up a spammer’s whole day.
Props to all the good people who instantly got on the bandwagon with quick adoption for the feature. Among those cited include WordPress, Live Journal, Six Apart (Movable Type and TypePad), Blogger, and even MSN Spaces! Because of its very simple approach, the technique will be quickly implemented and we won’t have to do much, if anything, to take advantage of this brilliant move.
Google, thank you for making me very happy today.
Filed under: blogging, policies, software
Posted by: Molly | 14:52 | Comments (12)
I heard about this on another forum. Definitely a great idea. What I’m also particularly happy about is that MSN and Yahoo are jumping on it as well
…. kind of like Search Engine Web Standards.
While I like your optimism, I think Anne got it in the most realistic way.
Sadly, the fact that link does not get credit does not mean your comments page won’t be spammed.
And this technique has the potential to be missused in other ways too.
Yeah! Dustin – I was thinking the same thing
Rimantas: Even Anne says he’s not against the idea at all. His point is well taken – it won’t STOP spam per se, but if adopted by a lot of sites, it sure will put a crimp in the motivation behind comment spamming. That’s certainly something to be optimistic about.
To me, a huge part of spam management is stopping the motivation. This doesn’t mean we still don’t have to make sure we use a variety of other solutions to address the spam once it gets here.
I agree, this could be a great thing, especially since so many are coming together for a good cause. Getting them to agree on anything is a feat unto itself!
But, what happens to the legitimate links within comments?
Google’s nofollow, and other similar methods like vote-links, are extremely harmful. I discussed why in Link Relationships Revisited, Part 1.
It is rather refreshing to love a large company in this day and age. Thanks Google!
About rel=”nofollow”
The topic rel=”nofollow” is hot now, originally feeded in the Googleblog post Preventing comment spam. Many developers are discussing it to a large extent, like Anne Van Kesteren, Erik J. Barzeski, Jeff Moore, Molly E. Holzschlag and Chuq Von Rospach…
I do NOT really think, this idea is as appropriate or brilliant as stated here before. Why? Read my blog post (About rel=”nofollow”) about it, where I tried to enlighten the whole thing with its different aspects.
I’d argue, that motivation for spammers is to get more traffic to their sites. Surely, high PR (and SERPs positions) is one way, but not the only way.
What we have with e-mail spam? Links in my email do not influence PR,
there are lots of spam filters, blacklists etc. etc. to stop spam, but spam does not stop. Why? Because (extremely large number of spam emails)x(very small number of people interested in it) produces result still worth bothering.
Correct me if I am wrong, but links in MT and Blogger do not contribute to PR already – because of redirects.
However if 100 000 people read comments and 100 of them click on the spammer’s link (and it does not matter, does this link count in PR or not) that’s 100 visits to the spammers site.
Plain text links are much less effective, but can still work.
So while there is a way to get a link somewhere spammers will do their
nasty work. Refferer spam, anyone?
The only way to stop this is to make it not worth the hassle.
I cannot think any way of doing this anytime soon
comment spam relief from Google
I LOVE GOOGLE for many reasons, and here’s one more. Google has implemented a simple and lovely means of ensuring that comment spam has no influence on ranking. The method is easy-breezy. Any hyperlink that has an attribute of rel=”nofollow”…
OT : does anybody know of a good list of referrer spammers to block?