Winer set to deliver comment spam knockout

January 18, 2005 | By Duncan | Filed Under News

Reports are surfacing that a mysterious posting from Dave Winer on the BloggerCon website stating “Watch this space for an interesting announcement.” and comments on Scripting News on Friday, indicate that Dave has teamed up with Google to test a rel=”nofollow” attribute that will deliver a knock out blow to comment spammers who depend on Google to deliver them higher page rank and therefore increased traffic through the increased links the spam provides them.

In laymen’s terms, the rel=”nofollow” tag would be inserted into all links within the comments of a blog, and by agreement Google would choose to ignore these links when calculating page rank, destroying the main benefit provided to Comment Spammers currently.

Whilst currently speculation, if Google does get on board, and blog software vendors agree to the tag, Comment Spam would start to decrease within 12 months of the implementation as users update their software and tools to incorporate the new tags.

Whether other search engines will need to get on board with the initiative is yet to be seen, but if Yahoo! and MSN where to also recognise the tag, the main sources of profit for the Comment Spammers would be cut off.

Not everyone is optimistic. Phaedo.cx posts that comment spammers will keep on spamming none the less on the chance that the blog they are spamming doesn’t have the tags in place, which is fair comment, but given time, enough bloggers will have the tag to make the spamming a waste of time and effort.

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Comments

5 Responses to “Winer set to deliver comment spam knockout”

å…”å?å¿«è·‘ on January 19th, 2005 6:29 pm

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Threadwatch.org on January 19th, 2005 6:42 pm

NoFollow - A Non-Solution to Comment Spam
Late last night bloggers all over the world started what im sure will be a very short-lived networked jump for joy as Google,
Threadwatch.org on January 19th, 2005 7:17 pm

NoFollow - A Non-Solution to Comment Spam
Late last night bloggers all over the world started what im sure will be a very short-lived networked jump for joy as Google,
Jangro: Affiliate Marketing, Search Engines, and Web Development on January 19th, 2005 11:49 pm

Search Engines Make a Move Against Blog Comment Spam
The Internet Marketing / Webmaster community is all aflutter about the recent Search Engine industry move to elminate comment spam. MSN, Yahoo and Google have all jumped on board by announcing their support for a standard method to allow webmasters to…
Platinax Internet News on January 20th, 2005 7:15 am

New nofollow tag cheers bloggers, but fails blogs?
A new tag is to be supported by Google, and it looks likely that Yahoo! and Microsoft will lend some degree of support to it. Publicly claimed to be for the fight against blog spam, it effectively leaves the search…

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