The NOFOLLOW Roundup -- Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.

The NOFOLLOW news has been floating around for a few days, but I wanted to wait for some things to shake out before I covered it. I figure it's as shaken as it's going to be for now, so away we go.

For those of you who don't run weblogs/aren't complete nerds: when one has a Weblog and one enables comments (a way for anyone on the Web to comment on one of your weblog posts), one often runs into comment spammers. Comment spammers are oofuses (often robot oofuses) who post non-related comments to Weblog entries to promote their own web sites and get linky-love from the Web site on which they're posting comments.

As a lot of these non-related comments are for pihlls or for NSFW content, comment spam is extremely unpopular. And now Google, MSN, and Yahoo have gotten together to promote a new tag that will prevent the linky-love -- nofollow. You can see the announcements below:

Google -- http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

MSN -- http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/01/18/nofollow_tags.aspx

Yahoo -- http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000069.html

The nofollow tag will be added to the end of links like this:

a href="www.example.com" rel="nofollow"

The rel="nofollow" will tell a search engine crawler that a) it shouldn't follow the link, and b) the site on which the link exists does not want to provide linky-love -- that is, it doesn't want to share the weight of its PageRank (or whatever the equivalent is for MSN and Yahoo.) These theoretically gives the comment spammer no incentive to comment spam, as they will get no search engine visits or linky-love out of it.

Now that sounds okay. But I think what we have here, now, is an arms race. And what we're going to have, later on, is a mess.

Getting linkage and promoting a site are important enough that I don't think comment spammers are going to be slowed down by this too much. So they get no crawling. So what? They promote their URL. Or, and this is what really scares me, they move to other spamming techniques. I have never had comments on my site, but I do have Movable Type "trackbacks." Even now I'm having problems with "trackback spam" -- people pinging the URL with irrelevant comments that, you guessed it, go to sales sites.

What would stop a comment spammer from using an odd teaser to try to tempt a comment reader to visit a site? That's what happens in spam. Or maybe to use a hyperlinked image with text and a legtimate-looking URL, which links to a spammy URL. The possibilities are endless.

I think the only things that will really slow down comment spam for now are a) not using comments and b) some kind of verification system that uses a human -- enter in the letters you see in the box below and that kind of thing. I'm glad three big search engines teamed up to endorse NOFOLLOW, it's nice to see them sharing love, but I don't think it's going to be effective for very long.

But if you want to take advantage of it while you can, here are some resources:

Movable Type nofollow plugin -- http://www.movabletype.org/news/2005/01/movable_type_nofollow_p.shtml

WordPress plugin -- http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=1021 (already implemented? -- http://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/cvs/2005-January/000913.html )

Pebble plugin -- http://www.simongbrown.com/blog/2005/01/19/pebble_nofollow_plugin.html

Nofollow and the Web Developer Extension in Firefox -- http://xcandy.co.uk/automatically-highlight-nofollow-links.html

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