Search Engines Give Bloggers Control, over comment spammers Options

[Randy]

Just read this on on the MSN Search Blog, but it appears elsewhere as well. As linked in the post there.

All of the major search engines have agreed to start supporting a new rel="nofollow" attribute to individual <A HREF tags to give bloggers the ability to control which links do and do not lend any linking weight.

Basically, if you blog and set up your installation so that any links in comments come out like

CODE

<a href="http:www.somespammysites.com/" rel="nofollow">

the search engines are going to respect your decision that you may not necessarily support the other site.

Good stuff and good for them. Nice simple solution.

Six Apart, the makers of TypePad, MovableType and LiveJournal are also on board with the plan. So that should make it easy for many folks to add this capability to their blogs.

Of course now we'll have to start inspecting those reciprocal link requests to make sure somebody isn't adding that to their code. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/lol.gif)

[sweepthelegnate]

Of course now we'll have to start inspecting those reciprocal link requests to make sure somebody isn't adding that to their code.

that's true. but overall a good solution for all that comment spam.


nathan

[Randy]

I agree Nathan. It's a good first step anyway.

Six Apart and some of the other blog makers have been looking for and pushing for a way to get some control over the blog spam. From what I've read they were the ones who got the ball rolling.

This one won't stop the folks who make blogs themselves just to spam, but that's another ballgame.

Hopefully everybody will hear about it and update their blog code. It looks to be a pretty simple process for MovableType, who already have a patch out. Gonna test it with my own personal blog tomorrow probably to see if anything breaks. Since mine is pretty heavily modded, and I need to apply another small upgrade first it should be a good test.

If it doesn't I'll ship off a note all of the folks I host that have MT blogs urging them to do so as well.

[Haystack]

It will be interesting to see how long it takes until someone writes a feature for Firefox that will differentiate links with and without the given tag. I imagine link related programs like Arelis will also react to this.

[sweepthelegnate]

I'm seeing a few posts about the new feature...so it seems to be getting along pretty quickly (at least in the web standards community of blogs)

nathan

[qwerty]

CNET News ran an article about it, but they refer to it as a TAG:

Steve Rubel, a blog evangelist and vice president of CooperKatz, a public relations firm, said the move is significant because blogs factor heavily into search engine rankings and that makes them a target for spammers. The "no follow" tag should mitigate the problem, he said.

So I can see the corrections all over the forums already...

No, there is no alt tag, it's an alt attribute, and the title tag is completely different from the title attibute, and there's no such thing as a no-follow tag, it's a value of "no-follow" for the rel attribute of an a tag (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/ranting.gif)

[chrishirst]

As if I'd do such a thing Bob (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[leadegroot]

... more than once.
(Maybe twice)
.
.
.
<flee>

[Randy]

Yeah, I noticed the same <tag> references on many of the announcements. Some even display code that makes it appear to be a separate tag, which is in error. It's an attribute damnit! (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/hysterical.gif)

I too think we'll see a lot of forum vendors start instituting nofollow as a general practice or as an add-on module for links in posts. Talk about a major shift in the way link spammers do business!

This whole thing fits in very well with my personal belief that Simply Elegant solutions are by far the best. It's easy to implement, and should do exactly what it intends to do. Give the power to control who benefits from links back to the people who should have it. Blog owners and Forum Administrators.

[Bernard]

This is really great news.

[leadegroot]

It will be interest to see how it pans out in the long run.
Personally, I won't be implementing it on my blogs at this point - I close the entries for commenting after a bit so spam isn't a (significant) problem.
I think the potential for this to subtley shift the structure of the web is there; as Scoble (IIRC) said - 'oh good, now i can link to that shonky business I don't like without giving them a page rank boost' (my paraphrase), which is *completely* outside the intention of the attribute.
So, interesting times, people (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)
But who would want to live in any other sort? (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[peter_d]

It won't work.

There will always be dead blogs and/or blogs that don't use this feature. So long as there are some in existence, then the bots will continue. The thing is, the bots won't make a distinction. They'll continue to spam all targets in the knowledge that a good enough percentage will stick. 30K links from 60K targets is still 30K links.

There are other reasons this will exacerbate, not solve, linking issues.

[leadegroot]

So... the same way that bayesian spam filters didn't kill mail spam, this won't kill comment spammers.
Their 'send' cost is 0, so that they are only getting 5000 hits from their 2 million attempts instead of 25000 wont matter to them.
Eek! Apart from to send yet more to try and get the numbers back up! (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/sad.gif)

The only way for the comment spam to stop is for the engines to implement block analysis so they can tell what are comment links and what arent.
All things with time.

[peter_d]

Eek! Apart from to send yet more to try and get the numbers back up!

That would be my guess, yes.

There's really only one way to keep a blog free of abuse and that's the way forums do it - have active moderators, and shut down old threads.

[sweepthelegnate]

here's a bookmarklet that shows links using no follow.

nathan