Is it a case of ask and you shall receive, or the squeaky wheel getting greased? We live in a time of instant gratification and 1.3 second search times, so when so many bloggers began to beg Google to do something to stop the incentive of rewarding comment spammers with high page ranks on their search service Google listened .
I had been refreshing the Google blog page all day waiting for this anticipated announcement, when I got a message from Jeremy Zawodny, whom I met at Web 2.0.
A Defense Against Comment Spam
I'm pleased to announce that Yahoo! Search is one of several organizations in support of a technique that should help combat weblog comment spam. Others involved are: Google/Blogger, MSN Search, Six Apart (TypePad, MovableType, LiveJournal), and WordPress.
By adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to hyperlinks, webmasters and weblog owners can tell search engines that the links are effectively untrusted. For example, this:
<a href="http://spammer.example.com/">buy now</a>
Becomes this:
<a href="http://spammer.example.com/" rel="nofollow">buy now</a>
We think this is a good first step toward significantly reducing the spam burden on bloggers and weblog hosting companies. It's great to see so many players on board. In the coming weeks you can expect to see the changes reflected in our web index.
Six Apart will now also offer Support for nofollow How is that for stealing Google's thunder?
XML got us in this mess, now XML will get us out with a simple Tag; rel=”nofollow”. Everybody sing, nofollow, nofollow, nofollow, comment spam is not finished, but is slightly impaired.
I’m going to turn-off my comments for a few days, I switched them off last night thinking I could foil the spam-bots, but as soon as I switched them back on this morning I got hit four times! Way to go Yahoo, Google, MSN, but we’re not out of the woods yet, it seems some form of CAPTCHA and moderation (the Human eye) is what will be required to rid us of this spam menus.