Nofollow seems a little silly to me

So in the grand spirit of "we'll show them," the major search engines agree to treat hyperlinks in pages with rel="nofollow" differently as an effort to combat blog comment spam. I can't be the only person that finds this a bit silly.

First off, the spamming is most obviously automated. At this point, it's still going to go on anyway. Second, at least on the .Text system, we can moderate or delete the comments anyway (which we know about instantly with the e-mail notification). The stuff doesn't stick around long enough to ever get indexed.

People are acting like there has never been spamming on the Web in cases where anonymous posting can take place. Give me a break. It has been going on for as long as discussion boards have been around. The only reason anyone cares now is because everyone has a blog that they own, unlike the countless message boards they visit but don't own. I especially find it funny that some people go as far as to say, "My blog is important and visited by millions, and a single link can skew page rank!" Wow.

The whole discussion misses the point: Free advertising is free advertising in the mind of spammers. It doesn't cost them a dime to send out thousands of e-mail messages, and it won't cost them a dime to spam thousands of blogs. I don't have the answer, but this certainly isn't it.

3 Comments

  • Jeff,



    To be honest, I don't have this all-the-way thought through, but to me it seems they do have a dime to lose by sending out the comment spam. Bandwidth costs a lot of money, especially if you're dropping thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of automated comments. So, to me, it makes sense that if their intention is to build Google (and other) search page rankings, and they see a drop in the effectiveness of their rankings, then the money is not well spent. Hopefully they'll spend it elsewhere.

  • You're kidding, right? You can get an unmetered 20 mbit server now for $200 a month. Assuming even a big chunk of text being spammed, that's a thousand messages per second! 3.6 million per hour!

  • Currently there is no anti blogspam solution at work.



    Which means I have to manually click on each entry in my inbox which has a blogspam thing in it, which costs time and offcourse since I'm not the admin of the blog site I can't do much about it.

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