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Monday, January 17, 2005

Report: Google to Put Kibosh on Blog Comment Spam

On the surface, when Dave Winer put up a placeholder post this weekend on the Bloggercon site promising "an interesting announcement,"  there didn't appear to be much more to the story. But since then several bloggers have reported that Winer was testing a new Google linking mechanism that might put an end to blog comment spam by omitting all links from its PageRank calculations that have a rel="nofollow" attribute tag. This would change the economics behind why people comment spam popular blogs - to boost their Google search rank. If this is true, it would certainly be welcome. Stay tuned.

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Report: Google to Put Kibosh on Blog Comment Spam:

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» New nofollow tag cheers bloggers, but fails blogs? from Platinax Internet News
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» New nofollow tag cheers bloggers, but fails blogs? from Platinax Internet News
SPECIAL REPORT A new tag is to be supported by Google, and it looks likely that Yahoo! and Microsoft will lend some degree of support to it. Publicly claimed to be for the fight against blog spam, it effectively leaves... [Read More]

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Comments

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The problem is that just as comment spammers who spew hundreds of comments on sites, only to have them vanish within hours aren't stopping what they are doing now - with no incentive of being indexed with the posts. So it'll be a long time before this makes a dent, IMHO.

But a fix nonetheless.

Also: comment spammers may not care about the indexing to some extent, and will continue to plaster blogs just for the sake of doing so. As revenge, of course.

Agreed. I've started receving spam which points is formatted as such:

Website: http://1adsfafs871231af
Email: 12312afdfsaf981312
Comment: I love this site!

Or whatever. It's very, very annoying because there's actually nothing to block (in the typical sense of "look for certain words").

And there's absolutely zilch benefit to the spammers. None. I finally isolated a character string that was happening in each one and I'm blocking that.

But, still, I don't think the returns are why most of them are doing it. The reality is that it's even easier to comment spam than to email spam. And it lasts longer. And they get more clicks.

It'll continue until there's no way to anonymously comment.

Hopefully it'll make a dent. I'm not holding my breath. The latest on WordPress is trackback spam. It's always something.....

Jeremy.

There's some speculation that those seemingly random strings are placeholders or test strings. I.e. if when they come back or search and they find those strings still on your weblog then your an open target and you get hit hard.

Every little bit helps. blogsnow supports it as of now:
http://www.blogsnow.com/nofollow.html

Hasn't anyone heard of the:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOFOLLOW">

I belive this has been around for years:

http://www.w3.org/Search/9605-Indexing-Workshop/ReportOutcomes/Spidering.txt

Until some form of punitive punishment is enacted we will keep suffering this indignation.

Wow, that Platinax Internet News Website sure attacked you with trackbacks. Did they ever explain why?

By the way, I agree Rick about the punitive punishment or continue with the suffering statement.

How does the MT Blacklist work? Anyone heard of it?'

By the way, I agree Rick about the punitive punishment or continue with the suffering statement.


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By the way, I agree Rick about the punitive punishment or continue with the suffering statement.

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