Fighting Back Against Blog Spam   1/21/2005 - 962 views, 1 Comment

Spammers have been using blogs to help boost their standings in search engines by posting massive numbers of comments that include links to their pornography sites, scams and get-rich-quick sites. If your site is linked by a top-ranked site or blog, then Google will often raise your site’s ranking…or at least that’s the thinking of spammers.

An announcement was made yesterday at Google:

“If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. 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.”

Q: How does a link change?

A: Any link that a user can create on your site automatically gets a new “nofollow” attribute. So if a blog spammer previously added a comment like

“Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site. ”

That comment would be transformed to

“Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site. ” ”

What we also found interesting was the following:

“Q: Is this a blog-only change?

A: No. We think any piece of software that allows others to add links to an author’s site (including guestbooks, visitor stats, or referrer lists) can use this attribute. We’re working primarily with blog software makers for now because blogs are such a common target.

Got more questions? Email commentspam-at-google.com. As we spot more areas where spammers still abuse the Web, we’ll contact the appropriate people in order to keep fighting comment spam.”

So, will this stop blog spammers straight away?   Some people…

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