j's scratchpad

Dave Winer has worked on the link attribute rel=”nofollow” to curb the power of comment spam on blogs using Userland software, like Manila. Google and a few more search engines and blog platforms support the attribute and more companies will probably do so soon, as well.

Peter Van Dijck explains further how this works:

"This means that you just add this attribute to all the links that are added by users, like links in comments. You don’t add it to the links in your blog posts. People can still follow ALL links, but search engines (only Google for now) would only follow the links in your blogposts. The stuff *you* link to in your blogposts still gets yummy Pagerank goodness – your blog doesn’t loose its Google power. …

… When you do this, the incentive for spammers to spam you (increased Pagerank) is pretty much taken away. Comment spammers don’t do it in the hope that some human will follow that link. They’re in it for the Pagerank."

As Peter explains, we’ll still probably get comment spam, but the value of spammers spamming us decreases if their sites can’t gain page rank by sticking thousands of links on highly ranked weblogs.

If you view the source of the post on the BloggerCon blog, you can see the attribute in the links for comments and trackback. If I understand what that means correctly, it tells the search engine’s spider not to go to the comments or the trackback. If you load the comments and view the source of that page, you can see the nofollow attribute in the links to people’s blogs. It does not appear in URLs entered in the comments box, though.

Because of how it appears on the Manila blog, it looks like something the server administrator might have to add, not something we bloggers have to do on our own.

Thanks for pointing this development out, ls!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 19th, 2005 at 11:42 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.