Comment spam is now futile
January 21, 2005 by Mike Wendland
The major blogging and search organizations have gotten behind an initiative called nofollow - a simple line of code automatically inserted in comment posts by the blogging tool that tells search engines to ignore Web addresses submitted by spammers solely for the purpose of increasing page rankings.
That means that there is no no incentive for comment spam. They are not going to gain hits or higher rankings. Them spam in futile. At any rate, on this blog, no comment spam gets through anymore thanks to a whole slew of precautions.
Want to learn more about this? Check out Ben Trott’s post: Support for nofollow.
Mike,
I don’t think this is the panacea that it’s being held to be. Check out Ben Hammersley’s weblog post about nofollow:
http://www.benhammersley.com/weblog/2005/01/20/let_no_fellow_nofollow_lest_we_all_lie_fallow.html
I don’t think it’s going to help in the long run. It may even make it worse, while penalising other, legitimate Pagerank-related usage.