Comment spam will not be stopped by nofollow!
Published January 20th, 2005 in GeekIt pleases me to see how quickly the blogging community/industry has come up with a proposed solution to the huge problem of comment spam. Unfortunately, ref="nofollow" will be just as effective of a deterrent to comment spammers as the death penalty is to the common murderer.
This proposal doesn’t stop spammers from cluttering your comment logs with links back to their lame sites. But, it does help data mining companies with the quality of their search results, which is why it was put together so hastily. Thus, I don’t benefit from this since I’m still forced to delete unwanted spam and close commenting on older posts.
Don’t get me wrong this is a step in the right direction, but it is in no way the end to comment spam!
5 Responses to “Comment spam will not be stopped by nofollow!”
- 1 Trackback on Jan 20th, 2005 at 6:37 pm
I figured out the permalink problem. There isn’t a permalink on the entry (permalink) page, just on the page that lists all the entries.
Damn you’re right! I’m going to explicitly put in the permalink tonight, to ensure people know where it is…
It won’t immediately stop comment spam, but it will hopefully eventually stop this problem as spammers realize that their spam is now useless. Spammers don’t leave comment spam in the hope of visitors to the site clicking on their links, but rather in order to artificially increase their search engine rankings. Once they see that this is no longer effective, they will hopefully give up and find a different way to annoy us…
@DigitalHobbit: This does not make the spam less valuable. Even if Google doesn’t value it, lots of people click those links. Add a tracker to them and see. It’s amazing. The only reason spam is viable is because people buy into it.
Education is the answer.