I Will Nofollow

Here's a ramp up in the arms race between comment spammers and blogs/search engines that I think will help a lot:

Three major search engines have partnered with blog software developers to combat spam that is placed in the comment sections of blogs.

Called "comment spam," the messages usually contain Web site links or advertising messages that are similar to those found in unsolicited e-mail. Often, the spam is designed to fool search engines into increasing the spammer's link popularity.

Google, Microsoft's MSN divsion and Yahoo announced that to fight the problem they are supporting a tag called "nofollow," which prevents links in blog comments from being seen by search-engine crawlers.

The purpose of comment spam isn't to make the reader follow a link, but to cause a search engine to see a site widely linked to (because the spam is widely sown) and therefore to give the spamming site a very high ranking. Essentially the search engines above are declaring that they won't use links marked "nofollow" to come up with their search result rankings. Blogs in return will need to mark links in comments "nofollow". If there's widespread cooperation, this will largely remove the incentive to comment spam. Spammers would spam all they want but to no effect. I think this will work.

This site's been hit by a wave of comment spam attempts in the last few weeks. A few tweaks to the site have prevented these comments from getting through, though a few tweaks on their side could change that at any time. It's quite annoying. I'm glad to see the big guys working together to fix this problem.

Update: Here's an excellent overview of comment spamming and the new "nofollow" attribute.