Preventing Comment Spam

Google has announced a great way to discourage and render useless comment and trackback spam. Basically, they have called on various blogging software authors to make links in comments and trackbacks include a special tag. The tag is rel=”nofollow”. Links that include this tag will NOT be given credit in pageranks by Google. This means that the process of placing a hundred links in your comments and increasing the the traffic to their spam site will be a thing of the past. This is huge.

I don’t know about other blogs out there, but I’m cleaning up my site every day and having to delete hundreds of bad trackbacks and comments. Once Blogsphere adds this to their template, it will be a saving grace for us all. I know that the spam will continue, but at least I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that it doesn’t actually benefit anyone…