Comment Spam Solution
I was just starting to get annoyed by comment spam. Someone keeps posting spam messages to my blog posts. Since they use a different IP address each time, I don’t really know how to block them. I keep deleting the comments. These people use automated programs to post links to a whole bunch of websites. Their goal is to get a lot of backlinks so that Google will raise their PageRank, think they’re popular, and put them higher in the list of search results.
Google has modified their PageRank system so that you can put an attribute in your links so that those links don’t get PageRank.
For example:
Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/”>discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.
That comment would be transformed to
Visit my <a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.
My only concern is whether or not this will be abused by a lot of people. For example, on my blog, I could put that attribute in all of my links, and not give anyone credit. That doesn’t really seem fair to me.
I only think that Google’s solution fixes part of the problem. Even with this solution, the comments are still visible to human readers.
I like the way that pLog (http://www.plogworld.net/) has solved the problem. There is an integrated Bayesian anti-spam filter, so the spam messages are automatically marked as spam, and never shown visible.
Wow, this has really become a heated debate in the blogging community.
In my opinion, the best solution is to use the “nofollow” attribute for anonymous users, and don’t use it for non-anonymous users. The trick is to determine which you are. One of my favorite ideas, but not without it’s flaws, is to use an image where the user has to type in the randomly generated string.
Read more here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/DareObasanjo/archive/2005/01/19/356177.aspx
http://www.aimlesswords.com/archives/20050118/nofollow_sucks/
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/01/18.html#a9229