So the big secret from last weekend seems to be that Google is going to add support for rel=”nofollow” attribute on links. The idea being that when ever Google (and hopefully other search engines) sees something like <a href=”http://www.google.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Google</a> they won’t use that to calculate PageRank (or PageRank like systems) for the page that the link points to. The thought behind this is that the folks who comment spam are doing it in a effort to raise their rankings in search engines.
I suspect there is probably some truth to this, but I doubt it is the whole picture. After all, I filter all of my email spam, but that doesn’t stop people from sending it to me. I’ve already written about this. So now we have Google doing something to deal with comment spam, as far as it is affecting them. If blogs implement this it will be great, for Google, not for blogs. Because Google will be able to refine their PageRank by avoiding links in comment spam, but it will be useless for blogs because they will still get bombarded by comment spam.
Another issue that bloggers will have to work out is wether rel=”nofollow” should be used in all comment links or just spam comments. It will certainly be easier to simply apply this to all comment links, so I suspect we will see this method used most (when it is used at all).
There is undoubtedly going to be lots of discussion about this.
UPDATE 4:45pm 18 Jan 2005: It looks like this is official now and includes “Google/Blogger, MSN Search, Six Apart (TypePad, MovableType, LiveJournal), and WordPress”. I’m certainly impressed to see some cooperation among these different companies/organizations/projects. Others are have announcements too: Six Apart, Google and MSN Search. I think that those behind this are also hoping that showing such a united front will add to the comment spam deterrent.
Unless this some how actually prevents comment spam from hitting a blog, it will still only benefit the search engines (and their users). If I read a blog entry that has 100 comments, 90 of which are spam, it still be ugly even if those spam comments don’t get calculated in PageRank.
UPDATE: 9:10am 19 Jan 2005: Another party on board: Technorati. They fall into the same situation as the web search engines though, this is great for them because it makes their search results more relevant, but useless for blogs because it won’t prevent comment spam.