:: Personal website of a Toronto web designer
Lately » Preventing comment spam
I just got a link from Rob - linear to an article at the Google blog that explains how to prevent comment spam with the attribute rel="nofollow".
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.
I'll implement this shortly.
:: Sasha, at 07:35 pm on Thursday, 20. January 2005
This won't stop spam. It'll just help to make sure spam doesn't get a high rating in Google's database. e-mail spam doesn't get rated, yet people send it anyway---the same applies on the Web regardless of Google.
:: J. King, at 10:00 am on Friday, 21. January 2005
I agree that Google's statement "we've been testing a new tag that blocks [comment spam]" is completely misleading. they later state "it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas" which is more accurate, but still misleading, in that other search engines would need to universally adopt this in order for that to be true.
In reality (cynicism mode: engaged), G is just trying to protect themselves from being widely (and accurately) seen as offering results subject to gaming by this mechanism. They prefer this solution in that they'll never have to make an editorial decision to "discount" a blog comment link--they let the blog tool authors dirty their hands with that work.
On balance, I think it's a good idea, but it serves G's purposes more than any other interested party's. That's not to say it lack any benefit to a blogger--the more widely it's adopted the greater that benefit, however.
:: linear, at 10:48 am on Friday, 21. January 2005
Well, I had several discussions with people from wikipedia about spam on coments. Lately I research categorisation problems alot and SPAM filtering is just one little branch. Well for a site like wikipedia it would waste alot of CPU time to run advanced clasification algoritms but for smallar sites people anyway can manually moderate their comments.
:: zoka, at 04:45 am on Saturday, 22. January 2005
Useless scrawling facts:
Top 5 scrawlers:
(updated once a day)
556 Sasha
488 zoka
316 vitez-koja
235 Davor
58 mungos
