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."

Comments

Re:It's one way...

[the_pooh_experience]

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.

Wikipedia

[wikinerd]

Wikipedia already implemented this feature. See here.

Re:Is the result valid HTML/XHTML?

[darkpurpleblob]

Yes and yes.

From the W3C:

Links in HTML documents - The A element:

rel = link-types [CI]
This attribute describes the relationship from the current document to the anchor specified by the href attribute. The value of this attribute is a space-separated list of link types.

Basic HTML data types - Link types:

Authors may use the following recognized link types, listed here with their conventional interpretations. In the DTD, %LinkTypes refers to a space-separated list of link types. White space characters are not permitted within link types.

These link types are case-insensitive, i.e., "Alternate" has the same meaning as "alternate".

User agents, search engines, etc. may interpret these link types in a variety of ways. For example, user agents may provide access to linked documents through a navigation bar.

...

Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile to cite the conventions used to define the link types. Please see the profile attribute of the HEAD element for more details.

Re:Opportunity for Firefox (plugin)

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not modify Firefox (or provide a plugin) that allows such links to be grayed out or otherwise marked specially?

Actually, are there any plugins already in existence that modify the appearance of a link based on a regexp match?

Let me introduce you to the wondeful world of userContent.css.

Something like this should work:

a[rel="nofollow"] {
text-decoration: line-through ! important;
border-bottom: dotted thin gray ! important;
color: gray ! important
}

This solves only 1/2 of the problem

[PeeAitchPee]

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.

Re:Useful links

[BohemianCoast]

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.

Use CSS

[JamesHenstridge]

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:

a[rel="nofollow"]:before {
content: url(an-image-representing-nofollow-links.png);
}

That will display the given image before any links marked as nofollow.