Monday, February 21, 2005

Preventing Comment Spam

Comment spam is when your blog receives a comment that simply says "Visit my site at Reality Me! Love your blog btw." Or perhaps you receive an advertisement in the comment. The hopes of the spammer in the recent past have not necessarily been to gain a couple of clicks from your comment but instead to falsely increase their page ranking in Google and other search engines (yes, there are others).

Google has come up with a method to not prevent comment spamming but make it so ineffective that the incentive is gone. Google's blog discusses this in more detail but the long and short of it is adding rel="nofollow" to a link will prevent a search engine from using that link as part of the page ranking criteria. For example, <a href="http://cursed-juggler.blogspot.com">Reality Me</a> is what comment spammers do now. Google's suggestion to end the effectiveness of comment spam is to show the link as <a href="http://cursed-juggler.blogspot.com" rel="nofollow">Reality Me</a>

Of course they are not suggesting that you edit each and every comment to add rel="nofollow" yourself. The makers of commenting software like Haloscan will do this automatically. Google's blog entry lists several companies that have already jumped on the bandwagon.

Special thanks to Christian Cantrell for bringing this to our attention.


Posted by: djuggler | 2:11 AM |