January 20, 2005

Beginning of the end of Comment spam?

I meant to post this yesterday - but better late than never - the story is already all over the blogsphere - but in case you haven't caught it:

Google, Yahoo, and MSN team up to fight comment spam.

You can now add rel="nofollow" to your anchor tags - and the 3 major search engines will not follow those links. So go ahead and update your blogging software to add this rel="nofollow" to links in comments that get posted to your site. Comment spammers are trying to improve their page rank - and this stops that from happening.

The Drupal community has been quick to act - and there are patches available to update your drupal site to implement this functionality.

andre

Note to self - install patches for movable type - or actually move my blog over to drupal one of these days.

Posted by andre at January 20, 2005 12:28 AM
Comments

There is a flip side to this rel="nofollow" attribute.

This is that genuine commenters will not make their way up the google rankings either.

If someone goes to the trouble of comenting about your post, don't you owe it to them to help them up the rankings a bit?

Posted by: Martin G. Brown at January 29, 2005 08:38 PM