Comments on: New Tool to Fight Comment Spam

By: damnum absque injuria

damnum absque injuria — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 17:58:48 +0000

Attention Comment Spammers
You can still spam this site if you want, but it won't do you an ounce of good. Neener.

Thanks: Clint Ecker. Hat tips to Venomous Kate and James Joyner, neither of whom have seen fit to install it themselves.

By: Xrlq

Xrlq — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 17:54:42 +0000

I've installed it myself. It doesn't stop you from inserting links, it doesn't prevent the links from working, and it doesn't even make them look any different to the reader. All it does is prevent Google, Yahoo!, etc. spiders from following them and counting them toward the rankings. This one's a no-brainer. Everyone should install it yesterday.

By: Electric Venom

Electric Venom — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 20:24:41 +0000

A Second Look At rel=nofollow Earlier this week I wrote about Google's decision to recognize the rel="nofollow" tag that's supposed to take away the incentive for spammers who try to boost their page rankings with annoying URL-laden comments. After some thought, and some wor...

By: McGehee

McGehee — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 19:03:06 +0000

ExpressionEngine is onboard also -- just posted a "nofollow" plugin with a couple of switches written in: If you're a registered member of the blog and are logged in, it can be set so that you can post any link without getting the attribute, and there's a setting to leave it off links that are in the local whitelist. I think I might use it but I'd still rely more on Captchas.

By: Rodney Dill

Rodney Dill — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:36:37 +0000

An additional thought, if the search engines would separately count and rank hyperlinks appearing in comment sections (with the nofollow tag) then the largest number/highest rankeed would be those place by spam robots and would be a way of identifying sites benefitting from spamming for boycotting, legal action, etc..

Most bloggers placing links manually would probably not be doing so to the extent that it would trigger an "I'm a spammer" flag.

By: Rodney Dill

Rodney Dill — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:29:58 +0000

The way I read it is that you can still put the hyperlinks in the comments, just the search engines won't take it into account for ranking. This should disincent spammers from placing hyperlinks in the comments, maybe without actually preventing it either.

By: Electric Venom :: A Second Look At rel=nofollow

Electric Venom :: A Second Look At rel=nofollow — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 +0000

[...] ings with annoying URL-laden comments. After some thought, and some words of caution from James Joyner, I explained that I wasn’t going to be incorporating the tag. Because, just as [...]