Comments on: Combatting Comment Spam

By: Stuart Moncrieff

Stuart Moncrieff — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 13:36:37 +0000

This is the only page on my website that attracts spam, as it contains several keywords that blog spammers search for when looking for fresh targets.

Consequently, I have had to disable comments for this page.

If you have something valuable to add, or would like to give me some feedback, please send me an email.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 04:00:24 +0000

There is a Kuro5hin discussion on this at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/1/19/35627/2443 it says that Google's solution will make things worse. A comment points out that "It's irrelevant to Google whether this stops comment spam. What it will stop is comment spam interfering with Google's page rankings, so it will improve Google's page results." The nofollow attribute means that we will be able to criticise and link without giving pagerank. http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/01/18.html#a9229

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 05:19:21 +0000

Check out the Google Blog entry on their solution to prevent comment spam.

If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

We hope the web software community will quickly adopt this attribute and we’re pleased that a number of blog software makers have already signed on.