Comment but nofollow

First it was graffiti on walls. Then it was junk mail,. In the "information age" it's junk faxes and an increasing torrent of undesirable offers in our emailboxes. In the past year, there's been a major increase in the volume of a new kind of graffiti junk spam — weblog comment spam (ich).

Comment spam has lately become more than a minor annoyance for the site owner. But, with the help of other members of the weblogging community, we've been fighting back.

One tool, available for those who use Movable Type, is MT-Blacklist, a plugin that lets you easily manage and delete comment spam. I've been using the Blacklist plugin for about a year now; it prevented the need for me to turn off comments entirely. Even better, as of MT 3.*, comments can now be moderated as well. Between MT-Blacklist and moderating, a lot of my troubles have vanished.

Still, there should be something else, a way to remove at least some of the incentive for comment spam and possibly reduce it that way. The folks at Google think this is possible and they've convinced Yahoo and MSN Search to join them, along with a bunch of weblog software developers, including SixApart (developers of Movable Type and TypePad, and recent owners of Live Journal) .

First, it helps to understand one of raisons dêtre for weblog spam. I have to presume at least some of it is simply "because they can". After all, humans have been scrawling their "tags" on rocks and walls for millennia; why should the web be any different?

Actually, the web is different in one special, meaningful-to-spammers way. The wall or rock someone scribbles on isn't propagated to anywhere else. But if he scribbles on a website and a major search engine picks up those scrawls before the site owner can clean it off... the spammers have found a way to artificially raise their rankings in the search engines by piggybacking on a weblog as if they were legitimate URLs.

I don't much like the idea of my weblog being used as a host for that kind of stuff.

Google's idea is simple - they've been testing a new tag that blocks comment spam but not allowing it to reach the search engines.. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when websites are ranked for search results. Yahoo and MSN Search have promised to ignore links with "nofollow" in them as well.

The hope is that if spammers get no obvious benefit from abusing public areas such as blog comments, they may... well, they probably won't stop. Nothng is ever that simple. I'm sure they'll find someplace else to scribble. But perhaps the bloggers can get some breathing room.

[ For more coverage of the "nofollow" initiative, see the article in eWeek. ]

Comment but nofollow ( in category WebTech ) - posted at Wed, 19 Jan, 18:33 Pacific | «e»