God, I sure hope so.This article quotes from a blogger who wrote:
“Google are soon to announce that they won’t be calculating PageRank for links with a rel=”nofollow” attribute. Finally, an official way of fighting the economics of comment spam by denying PageRank on user-submitted link content. Sam Ruby points to Mark Pilgrim’s prediction that spammers won’t care – they’ll spam anyway, on the offchance that they hit somewhere undefended. I’m optimistic – if the major weblog (and wiki) vendors get behind this one it could help stem the tide.”
Spammers don’t pollute our comments because they want you to go to their site (although that’s a nice side benefit, if you’re dumb enough to click their links). All they want is to get as many links onto the Internet as possible to up their page ranking on Google. This sounds like a great idea whose time came a long time ago. What are we waiting for?
(By the way, I had the new version of MT Blacklist installed just about 6 weeks ago, and it’s already blocked 50,000 spam comments. Nightmare.)
1
By miss-information.net
La fausse bonne nouvelle du “no follow”
J’en ai parlé ce matin, j’ai eu le temps de lire les différents billets de Nanoblog, Blog Herald , Blog Herald January 19, 2005 @ 5:07 pm | Comment
2
By Tom - Daai Tou Laam
I hope so as well. Pains in the ass, they are. It would be nice to see the search engines remove the incentive (or perhaps even provide a punitive measure like negative page rank) for comment and referrer spam.
Though it was kind of nice to see the hits come in from The Guardian via your kind thoughts on my review of “The Era of Zhao Ziyang”.
January 19, 2005 @ 5:24 pm | Comment
3
By Elliott Back
I just heard about this too, and wrote a quick WordPress plugin that implements it for the current version of WP. Let’s see how it works when the next pagerank update rolls around!
January 19, 2005 @ 7:44 pm | Comment