QotD: rel=nofollow
Posted January 19th, 2005 @ 12:48am by Erik J. Barzeski
Question: Will the 'rel="nofollow"' idea work?
My Answer: It's a step in the right direction, but I've gotta agree with Chuq: I don't think it's going to be economically damning enough to comment spammers. Furthermore, it hurts authentic commenters who leave their URL on my blog. If they're contributing, why shouldn't they benefit from some Google juice on a particular topic?
You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.
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Posted 19 Jan 2005 at 6:55am #
While this is a good feature that probably already has spammers groaning and slapping their foreheads, I won't use it on my own blog. No spam sneaks by me, and I want to give a little PageRank as thanks for commenting on my site.
But it will be great for the blogs who use default templates and never clean out spam from their comments. I'm looking at you, Blogspot and Blogger.
Posted 19 Jan 2005 at 8:21am #
If spammers train their tools to look for tags and skip those pages then awesome. I honestly don't care that some people will never upgrade because it's just a fact of life. What I care about is stopping the comment spam (even though it is small since moving to EE) from coming to my site.
Posted 19 Jan 2005 at 11:44am #
Perhaps Thou Shalt Follow
It didn't take long. Some bloggers are all up in arms about this new nofollow relation tag that Google proposed saying it destroys what blogs are all about and gives site owners a way to bump up their own rankings…
Posted 19 Jan 2005 at 7:22pm #
I think it's more like the air bag in your car. It isn't going to prevent a crash, but soften the blow.
Posted 19 Jan 2005 at 8:43pm #
I don't think comment spammers will really care about this, they use their automated scripts to send out thousands (if not more) pieces of comment spam every day. Sure, they won't get the boost in PageRank from Google on some of those sites, but until someone clears it, people will still see their spam.
Posted 19 Jan 2005 at 11:55pm #
isn't the nofollow tag only added to sites in comments from "untrusted sources" or something?
…or maybe just for people without typekey identities… either way, at least it's something.
(i wish typekey would just keep my IP logged in or logged in a cookie or something, i rather dislike having to re sign in all the time, so i end up not signing in at all.)
Posted 20 Jan 2005 at 5:42am #
About
The topic is hot now, originally feeded in the Googleblog post Preventing comment spam. Many developers are discussing it to a large extent, like Anne Van Kesteren, Erik J. Barzeski, Jeff Moore, Molly E. Holzschlag and Chuq Von Rospach (jus
Posted 20 Jan 2005 at 10:48am #
I completely agree: The non-semantic, inaccurately named nofollow relationship is outragously unfair to the vast majority of legitimate users that take part in the discussions on blogs, forums, newsgroups, mailing lists, and any other type of site that implements this harmful, proprietary extension. It will not only serve to limit (and effectively reduce) the page rank of spammers, but for legitimate users as well..
Additionally it's name does not accurately represent its meaning and is both named and designed to work soley with one particular user agent, without any regard for useful semantics, which opens it up for serious abuse.
I discussed all these reasons, and more, in Link Relationships Revisited, Part 1; and I will be proposing much more useful, semantic and less harmful relationships shortly, in part 2.
Posted 20 Jan 2005 at 1:18pm #
Nofollow and Comment Spam
Google recently announced an interesting 'solution' to the comment spam problem. . To answer the Question of the Day, I don’t think this will make much of a difference to comment spam.