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

It's one way...

[freitasm]

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.

Re:A gift to Microsoft

[ch3]

Well, since MSN Search seems to apply the same policy as Google it would do them no good either.

Is the result valid HTML/XHTML?

[maxwell demon]

Does HTML/XHTML allow "rel" attributes on links? And if so, is "nofollow" an allowed value for that tag?

Re:Is the result valid HTML/XHTML?

[joeljkp]

Yes, this appears to be valid. I can't find the part of the actual spec, but w3schools' XHTML reference lists it as an acceptible attribute to <a>.

"rel" is short for "relationship" - it can contain values like "previous", "next", "contents", "index", etc.

Now if only...

[deltwalrus]

Slashdot could implement something like this, it would make article comments meaningful again.

Re:Now if only...

[PetiePooo]

Slashdot could implement something like this, it would make article comments meaningful again.

They could even selectively add or omit it based on the comment's moderation. Include the nofollow tag by default, but if a comment with a link in it is moderated highly, remove the tag so search engines can use it. Sounds like the best of both worlds..

Band aid

[eddy]

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.

Re:Band aid

[eddy]

the incentive to spam goes away.

For a sane rational person maybe, but that's not how spammers work.

A quick example: For the last four years I've been getting spam to the account "stef" at my domain.

There is no account "stef" on my domain, and there haven't been for at least four years (previous owner I guess). So mail is rejected at RCPT TO.

... still they keep coming, year after year after year. Tell me that's rational.

Not every opportunity will disappear with this new link-attribute, and so there's still reason for spammers to spam. After all, it's really no effort on their part.

It's a pagerank question, not indexing

[Underholdning]

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.

Opportunity for Firefox (plugin)

[Schweg]

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?

Re:Opportunity for Firefox (plugin)

[Catiline]

Actually, you probably want to use

a[rel~="nofollow"]

instead of just an equals. There are other defined values for the rel attribute and you don't want to have your CSS miss this just because it contains more than just the "nofollow" tag.

rel="nofollow" on Slashdot based on karma?

[Anonymous Cowherd X]

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?

Re:Only one problem.

[miu]

There is something of an incentive here though, spammers seeking to elevate their pagerank will focus on sites that give them the best return. When large ISPs shut down open relays the spammers went after small ISPs, because of the increased attention from spammers the small ISPs shut down their open relays.

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.

Re:Good

[godlikenerddotcom]

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.

Much better solution - spamassassin

[EJB]

Why doesn't Google use spamassassin or another spam filtering tool? One based on Bayesian analysis - to determine if a page is just spam, and give it a lower score.
This can be done whether it is linked in a blog or not, and will improve the overall quality of the search database.

- Erwin

Re:This is open to severe abuse

[jaydonnell]

and if you trade links you now have to check that people aren't using nofollow links

Incredibly Off Topic

[SirTalon42]

"(an example here)"

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 :-(. 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...

Again, thanks for the link! Everyone whos into webdesign should be forced to read that site before they start ruining the Internet.