Anti-Comment Spam Initiative
Preventing comment spam
[Local PDF (28kB)]
So Google has created a new anti-comment spam tag, it’s a couple years too late, but at least it’s something. What it asks is that blog comment software add a rel="nofollow" tag to links in your comments. That way when any search engine goes through websites to rank the most linked/listed/etc, the spam comment links aren’t rated, thus hurting spammers. Sounds great right? I’m all for it, but it does have a caveat. What if one of your friends posts a comment to your post and you do want his blog URL to be linked normally? Then the above tag actually hurts my friends blog by not showing up in web searches.
On the bright side, many blog software have already implement this feature recently (or will soon enough) and other search engines will be following Google’s new tag method (Yahoo! and MSN Search to name a couple).
Personally I’m going to wait until some sort of whitelist feature is written for the nofollow tag or some other way so that my friend’s blog is linked properly. Comment spam isn’t affecting me at all anyway, ever since I installed WP HashCash, so this new tag feature will have to wait for some other day.