Scoble Confirms Google Silver Bullet Rumor

Robert Scoble today confirmed that Google indeed will introduce a new tag attribute today that will hopefully reduce blog comment spam. Watch this space later today for the announcement.

UPDATE: Stefanie Olsen at CNET has more details. Six Apart/TypePad are supporting the tag already. Yahoo is on board and MSN Search has also jumped in.

Comments

[Nick W]

Not really a confirmation Steve lol.. but it is quite a plausible story and it certainly wont come as a surprise if the *do* announce this.

Unfortunately, if its using the rel="nofollow" attribute on links as has been widely reported then it's a very sorry fix indeed.

Blog spam will continue, and thrive. If anything, you might see a marked increase in spam if they do this. It's the wrong way to go about it and spammers will just redouble their efforts in order to find the millions of blogs that have not implemented this code.

The right way to do this is by raising the bar on auto-submissions so high that it virtually stops. Not taking away the benefit of spamming from what will amount to the vast minority of blogs.

[Rob Thrasher]

Why not just use soem type of verification image like Overture, Register, YAHOO, etc. to prevent automated postings to blogs? Maybe I am oversimplifying the matter, but you tell me what you think.

[kpaul]

some of the kind folks at webmasterworld are saying it's mainly for show - that google already takes comment spamming into account in their algo - and that the PR move might actually make things worse by causing people to start their own spam blogs rather than spam other people's blogs...

[ceejayoz]

Why not just use soem type of verification image like Overture, Register, YAHOO, etc. to prevent automated postings to blogs? Maybe I am oversimplifying the matter, but you tell me what you think.

It has been tried, and as usual, the spammers have found smart ways around it.

All they had to do was set up fake free porn sites and require the people looking for free porn to do the CAPCHA image for them.

Plus, it's a non-accessible solution.

[The One True b!X]

Why not just use soem type of verification image like Overture, Register, YAHOO, etc. to prevent automated postings to blogs? Maybe I am oversimplifying the matter, but you tell me what you think.

Also, it's bad for accessibility, because it fails to function in browsers such as screen-readers for the blind.

[Mark Birbeck]

So the hype is already exceeding the reality! Not even Google are claiming that the proposal will "reduce blog comment spam"; all it will do is lower their page rankings. But surely not everyone at Google is out sailing their new yacht? This could be fixed in a hundred and one different ways. The problem they are trying to solve is one of indexing algorithms, not of HTML mark-up, but their solution actually runs counter to the whole meaning of the attributes used:

The problem with this whole proposal is that it changes the meaning of the @rel attribute -- or if we were to slip into OO terminology for a moment, it *overloads* the attribute. The whole point of @rel is to define a relationship between two documents. The whole point of 'nofollow' is to say that there is *no* relationship between two documents. It's like using a special value of the title element to say that there is no title, or a special value of the @style attribute to say that there is no style -- it's just plain wrong. You cannot say that the relationship between two documents is that a search engine should ignore the relationship between those two documents!

-- More at Meta Muddle at Google