Slashdot Mirror
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's nice to see Google, MSN, and Yahoo cooperating on this effort.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Don't forget to put that attribute in your track-back links either :)
Simon.
Forums and Blogs often contain very useful links. What about them? What about all those sites that are *only* linked to from blogs and forums, and that actually are great and useful sites?
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
The comment spam is mostly used to get a better searchengine ranking. A blog which uses this attibute on link tags is far less interesting to comment spammers, so chances are the moderaters have to delete less spam.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
RTFA. Slashdot could modify slashcode to automatically add the attribute to all links posted in comments. Comment spammers can't do anything about it, so they'll move away to other sites.
No normal links (i.e. not in visitor contributed content) should have the attribute. So slashdot will still be full of normal links; only the links in the comments will have the attribute.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
This is not a solution as far as I'm concerned.
Why stop the indexing of relative links from blogs to make google's life easier?
99% of the links posted in comments are relavent and would be beneficial to index. Why stop this for the 1% of jackasses out there?
The domains contained in the links from blogspam are well known, and there are plenty of blacklists out there. Why doesn't googleyahoomsn just remove these sites from its database? Its such an easy solution. I believe they already do this in some circumstances for link trading systems whose only goal is to get higher pagerank.
There are a lot of people out there who understand the PageRank system, and complain that if they add outgoing links on their site then their previous PageRank will be "leaked" to other sites, rather than their own internal pages.
Well, luckily Google has now released a way for people to link to each other without leaking PageRank. Yes, the nofollow relation. So, now everyone can link to each other, and no-one gets any benefit out of it whatsoever.
This tag is not a bad idea, but I think the good things it could stamp out weren't considered anywhere near as much as the few bad things it can stamp out..
But somehow I don't think spammers really care if a blog uses this system or not. It's probably easier to just spam all blogs than to figure out which are useless. Just like email spammers don't care much if an address is valid or not.
Some people think that adding spam filters to an email account reduces the spam sent, while it only reduces the amount of spam received. This solution does neither.
However, all efforts to fight spam should be welcomed and supported. Despite my pessimism, it will be interesting to see how it turns out.
I think this last paragraph is important. "nofollow" is not on the official list of link-types. If blog authors wish to use this attribute in anchor elements, they need to define it properly (or at least properly reference a definition).
Remember back in the 90's when Netscape and MS were breaking standards right and left so that their browsers would have an edge on the competition? That was the wrong way to do it, and it created the mess we're in now with sloppy HTML spewed all over the web and designers unable to use compliant designs because the most popular browser doesn't even try to support standards (an example here). Google is doing this the right way. They went back and read the HTML specification to see if it was already capable of doing what they needed. It does? Great! Let's utilize the standard!
Granted, HTML these days has a much better design than it did in the pre-4.0 specifications. Back when Netscape and MS were at each other's throats the document format was actually incapable of doing a lot of things that designers wanted to do on the web. But HTML is a very mature format these days.
Sysadmin Geeks who have to clean up the messes left by shoddy Microsoft products, day after day, hate their products because they make extra work for us. We hate Outlook, IE, and IIS because their penchant for spreading worms and viruses. We hate service packs which break more than they fix. We hate Frontpage because of the non-standard, blecherous, broken HTML it spews forth. We hate the general lackadasical attitude Microsoft has about security and quality in general.
Libertarian-minded geeks hate Microsoft for their flagrant disregard for the law and the courts. We hate them for the way they blatantly infringe on other company's patents and lawyer their way out of it. We hate the way they bankrupt or buy out anyone making a product which actually competes with them. We hate the way they use puppet companies (SCO, BSA) as hired thugs to bully other companies on their behalf.
Anti-corporate geeks hate Microsoft because it's a prime example of corporate greed run amok and of the dangers of unfettered capitalism.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?