Phil’s Diary - [Blog @ http://www.philsdiary.net/]
Comment spam has been a problem for a while now within blogging software. Just like email spam, it’s a real pain. This place alone for example got 351 attempted spams yesterday, and 161 so far today. Lots.
So a few of the blogging and search companies have got together and decided to endorse the rel=”nofollow” attribute of links. The blog software will put these extra tags in, and the search engine people will not follow them.
The idea of this is that while the spam may well contain URLs, the search engines will ignore the links, and so the spam URLs will be low on a search engine result list if searched for.
So if you reduce the reward for the spammer maybe they’ll stop wasting their time trying.
This initiative is support by MT and other blogging software, as well as Google, MSN and Yahoo search engines amongst others.
In the short term it’ll probably have no effect at all. And in the long term it may help, it may not. But every thing that can be done to kill off spammers is good in my books.
Posted by Phil on January 19, 2005 07:14 AM | Categories: Technology
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I am not convince this is going to matter much. Spammers are used to low rewards but because their investment is soo low that doesn't matter. Automated tools don't give up because the response is low.
Now if one could push the press and public-opinion to equate spammers with terrorists (the same way the studios equate their customers with pirates) there would be a whole new set of laws to be applied. Sending spammers to Guantanamo sounds like a good first step.
Posted by: sjon at January 20, 2005 6:56 AM
"But every thing that can be done to kill off spammers is good in my books."
"I’m not a murderer. Not yet anyway. And I don’t intend to be either. Strange eh?"
. . . and you wonder how you got there . . . Now whether killing off spammers should count as murder, or merely pest eradication may be debatable, but Google's stand seems to be pretty clear.
Posted by: Jon at January 19, 2005 1:06 PM