Search Engines, Bloggers Team to Fight Spam (eWeek)
Google Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s MSN division, Yahoo Inc. and Six Apart Ltd. announced late Tuesday that they are supporting a tag called “nofollow” to exclude links in blog comments from search-engine crawlers and to prevent spam posts from influencing search rankings. Comment spam occurs when spammers attempt to dump Web site links into the comment sections of blogs. The spammers often use automated bots with the goal of trying to game search engines by increasing their link popularity. Incoming and outgoing links are a major factor in determining where a site ranks in search results.
The “nofollow” tag is already a part of HTML, but Google suggested using it as a way for blogs to tell search-engine spiders to ignore hyperlinks appearing within comment sections, trackbacks and referrer lists, said Anil Dash, vice president of Six Apart’s professional network.
Via Venomous Kate, who points those of us who use WordPress to a plug-in to take advantage of this functionality.
Personally, I’m waiting a bit before installing it on OTB. The obvious problem with this is that I actually want people to be able to put links into posts to their blogs. I insisted on the ability to show in-line TrackBacks before making the switch to WP for precisely that reason.
