Google, MSN & Yahoo join forces against comment spam… but at a price
Published by on January 29th, 2005
Could this be the end for comment spam? Read the article from Google here.
This alliance between the larger search engines does not, of course, prevent comment spam from being flooded onto our blogs, but will do significant damage to the potency of a spammer’s campaign. Comment spammers attempt to raise the page rank of their site on Google search results by creating hundreds of incoming site links. Google registers these incoming links as one element of a site’s popularity and therefore ranks the site higher in it’s listings.
By tweaking comment and trackback links, a blogger can now force the compliant search engines to ignore links created within comments and trackbacks, therefore immediately removing the power of the spam to increase pagerank. How this is done is covered in the Google blog article.
The downside to this, of course, is that all trackbacks and comments would have the new tag applied, which also prevents outward linking to legitimate sites, commenters and linkers. One might say that if comment and trackback links are not actually established by the site authour, they should not be considered a viable, pagerank enhancing link in the first place.
Bloggerheads make a valid point on the subject: “… we’ll know it works and the comment spammers will know it works… but will the people who get sold comment spam as a service know it works?”
This move will certainly not stop comment spam floods, it will just make the spammer partially impotent.
Unfortunately there will still be a hoard of old blog pages, under-maintained blog sites and bloggers using applications which do not include the new tag, to give the spammers plenty of incoming links. Will the larger blogs take the trouble to add the new code to all their previous post comments? Nearly everyone has sophisitcated spam filters on their email these days - has that stemmed the flood? Perform a Google search on some comment spam sites and you’ll find countless of apparently regularly updated and maintained blogs awash with comment spam within their old archived articles.
It is good to see the larger internet organisations taking steps to improve the virtual environment. It’s a little late, but at least it’s something.
2 Responses to “Google, MSN & Yahoo join forces against comment spam… but at a price”
February 6th, 2005 at 5:26 pm
Reading this I got a great idea! (at least I think it is..)
Google, MSN, etc. Should establish a joined and open blacklist system - the list they use should be the exact same one as constantly updating Jay Allen’s master MTBlacklist. That way all links going to those who engage in comment spammers wouldn’t register on Google, and as a side bonus instead of raising their page rant, companies who engage in spamming could actually have their pagerank lowered..
How does that sound?
February 7th, 2005 at 11:07 pm
Hmmm… interesting idea. The only problem is the ease with which innocent sites might be added to the blacklist. There is a trend of negative spam marketing starting up here and there, in which a company will spam ‘on behalf’ of their competitor in order to damage their reputation. Not common, but it’s happening. Blacklists would make this much easier.
Here, with the simple measures I’ve implemented, no comment or trackback spam is getting published and there’s nothing additional to do when leaving a comment. All I have is the task of deleting a bunch of moderated trackbacks every few days.