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Google Cans Comment Spam
fthiess writes "Comment spam is in many ways even more annoying than regular email spam, since you generally have to do more than just hit the delete button to get rid of it. Its defining characteristic is that spammers abuse websites where the public can add content (blogs, wikis, forums, and even top referrer lists) to increase their own ranking in search engines. It seems, however, that the days of content spam are numbered: today Google announced that, in partnership with MSN Search and Yahoo!, that they have implemented a way to block content spam." (More below.)
"Briefly, you just change your blogging/wiki/forum/etc. software so that any hyperlinks in publicly-contributed text have a new rel=nofollow attribute added to any anchor tags. Google, MSN, and Yahoo! will now no longer index any such links, so the motive for content spamming disappears. Especially hopeful is the fact that a slew of makers of blogging software, including Six Apart, have announced they are supporting the new attribute."
It is not a solution meant to change the content on a website (that would be tantamount to censorship). It only changes how the search engines handle the links (note: the supporters/developers of such a standard are search engine companies).
The best question raised in this post is if such a tag is standards acceptable.
The point is that the motivation to spam blogs rests on the assumption that posting links to one's site on blogs elevates the Google (Yahoo, MSN Search) rank for the sites linked to. Once that assumption is invalidated, the incentive to spam goes away. It should actually help quite a bit.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
It's an interesting idea, but it's probably a matter of short order before MS starts to use this to cut out non-MS sites.
Wikipedia already implemented this feature. See here.
Yes and yes.
From the W3C:Links in HTML documents - The A element: Basic HTML data types - Link types:
Too lazy to search, huh? Ok, I'll give up moderation and search for you :)
And the answer, of course, is yes. "rel" attribute, valid for "a" and "link" element types. Take a look at the source of any Wordpress weblog and you'll see it being used for many things already.
The caveat is that you should define a profile about the valid keywords you'll be using in "rel"; I don't know if Google is using a profile, but it's not mandatory.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
Let me introduce you to the wondeful world of userContent.css.
Something like this should work:
While this will prevent spammers from bumping up their sites' Page Rank (probably their primary motivation for comment spam anyway), it doesn't prevent their bots from spamming targeted blogs etc. in the first place. That is still best handled by the blog software providers.
For example, WordPress has a variety of different plugins for handling comment spam. The best one I've seen renders a series of characters graphically (a la TicketBastard) which the user (a human, of course) has to type into a text field on the comment form before their comment is accepted. Blogs implementing this type of mechanism typically have spam coming from bots drop down to zero.
Links in the main body of the blog post will be fine. Blogs of course, have high page rank because bloggers comment on each other's blogs. This tag may have a side effect of generally reducing the page rank of blogs.
As for useful links in comments; if they're really good sites, people are bound to blog about them more generally. And my poor blog gets few enough hits that it will be no problem for me to manually edit genuine comments to remove nofollow tags.
> still they keep coming, year after year after year. Tell me that's rational.
It's rational because removing the account from their spam lists won't make them any less profitable, but removing even 1 live address might, so all things being equal (no limit on the number of addresses being spammed, not much cost difference in a list of email addresses which is this rather than that big) you might as well leave them in.
It is pretty easy to make rel="nofollow" visible to normal users too in modern web browsers using CSS. You could use something like this:
That will display the given image before any links marked as nofollow.
They will if they put in their client-side stylesheet, or the blog owner puts it in the site's stylesheet. I do similar things to put "[PDF]" after PDF links and "[reg]" after nytimes.com links.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
There's lots of power you can exert over the appearance of web pages through your client-side stylesheet.
If only there were a way to restrict a set a rules to particular sites, or that you could trust sites to put ID attributes on their BODY tags to uniquely identify their pages to the world, even just the domain name (substituting some other character for the dots).
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Microsoft is not even a large company. What do they have, 10,000 employees or something? IBM has well over 300,000. IBM takes in way more revenue than Microsoft, too. There are companies that employ more people than medium-sized governments. Microsoft is not one of them.
This new tag will not restrict blogs from comming up in search results. It only restricts the Spamvertised sites from search results, not the blog with the spam links.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!