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Google Cans Comment Spam

Posted by timothy on from the whomp-whomp-whomp dept.

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."

4 of 434 comments (clear)

  1. GMAIL by wpiman · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    I had first a Yahoo account and recently got a GMAIL account. What was of interest is that Yahoo put the GMAIL request into their SPAM folder....

    How is that for content filtering?

  2. Hey, isn't THIS comment spam?!? by ysegalov · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    (of course not, this is an intelligent discussion)

  3. Re:It's one way... by croddy · · Score: 1, Offtopic
    A blog which uses this attibute on link tags is far less interesting to

    blog? less interesting? how could a blog be any less interesting?

  4. Crossword puzzle clues? by wayne606 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Here's something funny that happened to me... I was doing the NYT crossword puzzle and typed in one of the clues (I think it was "prince valiant's wife") to Google - I know, that's cheating - and the top hit was a Russian site selling Viagra or something. I wonder - do they enter in all the clues to these puzzles as hidden text on their pages and get them Google-indexed in time to catch the many lazy people who do the same thing I did?