Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

Rel="NoFollow"

Blogs are prone to spam attacks, much higher in magnitude in comparison to other applications as forums etc. for three reasons:

1. They allow visitors to post comment.
2. Visitors are not required to login each time for posting comment to each blog as blogs generally support commenting without logins. And even if they require login, a single login to the blog provider (as wordpress.com or blogger.com) is sufficient, in contrast to forums where a member of one forum don't automatically become member of other even if the two have the same provider (as informe.com or phpbb)
3. Bloggers normally don't moderate each comment.

Now why do spammers spam? Don't say because if they don't spam nobody will call them spammer, they anyways don't like themselves to be called so. Didn't you see the unsubscribe link at the bottom of spam mails, quoting all sorts of laws justifying their action (that the links never work is just one flaw they have).

Let's get back to Comment Spam. They do so mostly to get more links pointing to their sites, thus making search engines to believe that they are site of high importance and thus getting higher positions in searches for the keywords that contained the link. They are in no way interested in getting traffic through those comments for which a single link could have sufficed.

In order to discourage this practice and preserving the reliability of their search results, Google came up with a way to prevent comment spam i.e. adding REL="NOFOLLOW" attribute in the link posted though comments.

The REL attribute is included in HTML standard to show the relationship the linked page bears with the current page, thus guiding the User Agents and Search Engines to act accordingly. Here google and other search engines will know that the links are not to be counted as a vote for the linked site. Earlier sites used to link to such pages, using redirect from one of their own page.

While Google proposed the NOFOLLOW relation other search engines also agreed with the step and followed. A number of Blog providers and Softwares too modified their softwares to accommodate the proposal.

Though this step was taken as early as January 2005, most spammers still seem to be unaware of the developments and result my blog gets hundreds of comments each month which thanks to Akismet finds way to trash.

The Blogs being the prime victims were given priority for this implementation, forums and wiki's and other applications are also moving to it.

Comment Spamming may not completely disappear, but at least this step is preventing spammers getting rewarded with high ranking and positioning.

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