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Preventing Blog Comment Spam

by Blane Warrene

This Google blog post was passed along to me today. Google is implementing a tag that penalizes blog comment spammers. They have garnered the support of other search engines including MSN and Yahoo and some prominent folks in the blogosphere. Definitely worth a read if you are a blogger and/or support customers who blog.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 19th, 2005 at 10:51 pm, contains 56 words, and is filed under Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. The views and opinions in this blog post are those of its author.

This post has 5 responses so far

  1. mmj Says:
    January 20th, 2005 at 12:34 am

    This does not penalise the spammer, but it causes the link to be ignored when Google does its pagerank calculation. So, the spammer’s site will neither gain nor lose pagerank as a result of the link existing.

     
  2. hotnuts21 Says:
    January 20th, 2005 at 5:38 am

    If its still the case that outgoing links on your page, dilute your linking structure and therefore lower the page rank passed around the site then this could actually be used to prevent this. If you implemented this on a forum, and made it so all outgoing links used this tag, even in signatures etc, then when google comes along, its going to see no outgoing links except your normal site ones.
    So this could be used negatively by some webmasters. If you have a site with high PR, and a lot of people who are allowed to post outgoing links, you implement this and voila your own page rank goes up, but your users get nothing passed to them, in terms of PR.
    It could be utilized sneakily.

     
  3. Ren Says:
    January 20th, 2005 at 7:37 am

    Whilst the rel=”nofollow” isn’t going to stop comment spam, it is still a useful.

    Thou from what Ive read about blog software providers so far, applying the attribute/value to all urls in comments, seems the wrong way togo. Surely blog apps now need whitelists, blacklists, and URL moderation, so the attribute can be applied selectively.

     
  4. Ann Says:
    October 2nd, 2005 at 3:49 am

    I could not imagine how google’s algorithm to detect a blog whether containing a spam or containing useful information. I don’t think it could be done perfectly.

     
  5. Diggo Says:
    October 29th, 2008 at 4:59 pm

    Thanks a lot, dude :)

     

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Your Blogmaster is...

Blane Warrene

Blane Warrene

Blane is a writer and researcher focusing on Apple and Open Source technologies. Prior to this, he helped found a commercial software and consulting venture, and worked in the financial services sector as a director of technology and in varying technical roles. Blane maintains Open Sourcery: SitePoint's Open Source Blog.

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