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 certainly will help filtering some of the spam sites out of Google rank and so on, but the links will still be there in blog comments, bulletin boards, etc. The Googlebot will not follow the links, but human readers won't see the NOFOLLOW tag - and they'll click. It means that moderators still have manual work to do.
Well, since MSN Search seems to apply the same policy as Google it would do them no good either.
Does HTML/XHTML allow "rel" attributes on links? And if so, is "nofollow" an allowed value for that tag?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Worse...how about if a competitor hacks a site and adds the tag to their competition's links...that would let the evil competitor up their Google page rank in a reverse sort of way...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Slashdot could implement something like this, it would make article comments meaningful again.
--- "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all..."
I'm not really into blogging so I don't know how big of a problem this is. I get some spam in my guestbook, which I promptly remove. The spam iteself is what's really irritaing, not the potential "elevating" of the spamvertised site in search-engines, where I've never personally run across one that I can remember.
Am I correct in assuming that these sites pops up and down relatively often? Maybe it'd be possible to use temporal component to the rating. Say if the link points to a site which was just registered two days ago, it's given a very very low weight, and then you ramp up as time goes by. As spam gets deleted from blogs and guestbooks, time would work against these spammers. Or? I dunno.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Google, MSN, and Yahoo! will now no longer index any such links
Not quite. What happens is, that the link wont add anything to the site in question. As you probably all know, most search engines rank pages by incoming links - it's not just google. By adding this tag, the incoming link wont count.
I think this is a great idea. It will probably break the w3c compliance, but hey - anything to piss off a spammer.
Underholdning.info
Actually, are there any plugins already in existence that modify the appearance of a link based on a regexp match?
Will this be implemented on Slashdot as well? Perhaps those with karma lower than neutral would get a rel="nofollow" tag added to the URLs they post?
I'd LOVE to hear somebody explain exactely why they are not theoretically screwed here. As near as I can tell, no matter what they do, people are still going to be able to make the "miserable failure" trick work, and if they can do that, all of the spammers can/will end the usefullness of search engines as we know it.
So if the big blogs use the attribute then spammers will go after the slow to upgrade folks, in self defense most of them will upgrade eventually.
Really even for a custom designed visitor book or blog it is not that hard to add the attribute to every hyperlink in user comments. Most such programs already do mangling and vetting of submitted html.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
There is plugin for WordPress. However, the problem is that now even legitimate comment links won't have an effect, which is going to skew Google's results to favor only story links. I'm not sure we appreciate the full ramifications of this quite yet.
If your competitor can 'hack' your website then you have more to worry about then them adding 'nofollow' attributes to it, so i don't see why this would be an issue
This can be done whether it is linked in a blog or not, and will improve the overall quality of the search database.
- Erwin
You're right. This "solution" will do about as much as against Comment SPAM as recent US Federal Legislation has done for e-mail SPAM.
The BLOGS that collect this kind of SPAM in their comments are being run by people who either don't know how to, or don't care enough to update to the most recent version of, for example, MovableType. This "solution" requires action on the part of the people hosting the BLOG, something that I can guarantee will not happen with the idiots who can't even be bothered to take the existing rudimentary steps necessary to limit BLOG SPAM.
Anything that requires action on the part of the people administering the BLOG will fail to make an impact, plain and simple. How many MovableType BLOGS are out there with literally pages upon pages of SPAM comments? How many of them are EV ER edited, moderated or subjected to a little house cleaning?
No, a far better solution would be to NOT index ANY BLOGS unless the bloger take action, such as adding something a SPAMMer can't inject with comment SPAM, like a specific Metatag in the document Head.
I hear a bunch of people wine about how this will end up restricting BLOGs from coming up in search results. Fine, I'm OK with that. If the people administering the BLOG can't be bothered to take action to reduce BLOG SPAM, then the site is unlikely to contain anything I'd be interested in anyway.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
and if you trade links you now have to check that people aren't using nofollow links
"(an example here)"
:-(. So much stuff you can't do without making it look broken to IE users (though I guess you could check the user agent string via PHP and modify the page based on that...
Wow! Thanks for that link! That site is awesome! It's amazing what you can accomplish using pure CSS magic!
Too bad IE still doesn't support all of CSS1 even
Again, thanks for the link! Everyone whos into webdesign should be forced to read that site before they start ruining the Internet.