Kaloo Kalay!
Uncle Andrew
This just in from the fantastic folks at Google: a really great new way to combat comment spam in blogs. Since so much of the comment spam out there is used for Google Bombing, this might very well spell the end of a lot of spammers’ efforts.
Of course, there are likely to be countermeasures, possibly even hostile actions against those blogs that employ the “nofollow” attribute, but I do truly love the idea of rendering the goal of the vast majority of comment spam unattainable for the spammers.
You go Google!
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January 24th, 2005 at 12:07 pm
I’m really excited about this, too! The people who code Nucleus (my blog software) have already announced their plans to add the “nofollow” attribute to the next release.
It should be interesting to see what the trickle-down effect is.
January 26th, 2005 at 11:10 pm
This decision by Google has really made a splash out there. I’ve been reading a lot of posts on a lot of sites regarding people’s take on the efficacy of this tactic. I love the comment I saw over and over again that this would ruin the link rankings of a lot of blogs that are trying to make it into the search engines. Um, no, it wouldn’t; all you have to do is omit the “nofollow” tag.
I can imagine, however, coment spammers deciding to bombard blogs that use the tag with spurious, non-commercial comment spam that flies under the radar of most spam blockers (no links, no keywords, etc.), just as a punitive measure. 🙁