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."
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.
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..