Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Comment spam and nofollow

AOL Journals hasn't been hit by comment spam yet as far as I know, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.  We're somewhat protected because we don't allow anonymous comments, but comment spammers can get around that once they put some effort into it.
So AOL Journals plans to support the initiative to make at least one form of comment spam ineffective -- the rel="nofollow" attribute.  The idea is that this would be honored by search engines such as Google, and would mean that these links wouldn't count towards increasing the page rank of the target.  So, this form of spam would be rendered useless immediately.  Of course, other forms would still persist, but I say it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness.   Or at least do both in parallel.

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