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…
January 19, 2005 @ 2:44 pm
mr castledine’s no spam feature has eliminated spam completely from my blog. i was doing a lot of cleanup too, still have some to do on the old freedomblog.
*checks discussion view real quick*
yep, still nothing. that template is open source now, if anyone wants the code… some kind of clever javascript jiggery pokery.
January 19, 2005 @ 4:55 pm
Blogsphere also incorporates this no-spam code but I noticed in the last beta release something weird has happened and it has become disabled.
I’m working on the nofollow stuff at the moment. Have a cool idea on how to extend it slightly further…
January 20, 2005 @ 5:12 pm
It’s not all good. Since the blogging packages will basically have to use that nofollow thing for ALL links in comments, the positive effects of cross-blog linking also go away. I think this really just makes life easier for Google.