How To Prevent Comment Spam With Google's No
Follow Attribute
Author: Danny Wirken

Putting up and maintaining a weblog of your own could be done
for free or built into your paid domain site. Either way,
whatever you put up on your blog becomes accessible to
practically anyone on the World Wide Web. Your blog has the
potential to gain many regular followers and once-in-a-while
visitors, given that you deliver content that is relevant and
interesting, making it an excellent medium for advertisement or
promoting products, services, or other websites relevant to its
general area of discussion. Thus, it is a reason for companies
paying blog owners to publish their ads on their blog sites.

What happens, though, if a certain company or enterprising
individual tries to get onto your blog through the comments
page with an active link to their site? That's what's called
comment spam, and a business enterprise can be the least of
your worries when it comes to this underhanded way of getting
Google search ranks up. Enterprising entities do this not
merely to promote the site to those who access that particular
comments page, but more importantly to increase their ranking
in search pages to that the site will stay on top of the search
return page.

Another version of comment spamming involves a website owner
who only copies the content of his or her site from a different
website that ranks high on the Google search page. That way,
this dishonest site owner doesn't have to work as hard, to
promote the site and gain a considerable following. The good
news is that, finding out if one's site content has been
copied, has become very easy, as copy detection programs can be
found online. Now, let's go back to the links problem.

Fortunately for blogs and sites that allow trackbacks and
comments from others, Google has announced their development of
a way to decrease the occurrence of comment spam. It's a feature
known as the "nofollow" attribute, which allows site owners to
add an additional attribute in the form rel="follow" to any
href code active link. This added part of a href link commands
Google spiders to disregard a link that leads outside of the
host site. The objective of this new development is to keep
those who abuse open Internet sites from reaping the benefits
of their misdeed.

While distressed blog owners may rejoice at this good news,
some may opt to weigh the pros and cons of this new feature. To
a business owner, a positive implication of using the no follow
attribute is that, he or she will be able to avoid freeloaders
trying to ride on his own site's Google ranking. Google's new
tag can offer you an increased control on the effect of a link
posted in your site by someone else without your prior
permission. This has the potential to increase the possibility
of that someone moving on to trying other possibilities that
will increase traffic for their website. When issuing comment
spam loses its benefit, then the spammer can hopefully try
other things that are potentially laden with honesty, for a
change.

Also, the new development will help strengthen the notion that
bloggers and site moderators must make an effort to ensure that
links that lead to their site will not disappoint, and their
content are beneficial to the users of that particular site
hosting the link. In addition, site owners must try to focus on
outstanding and read-worthy content that will have enough impact
to the online community that other sites will want to provide a
link to their site by their own choice.

Perhaps the only Internet users who will find this new
attribute disadvantageous are those who have become accustomed
to using comment spam as a means to promote their own site.
However, it should instead be a challenge for them in putting
up worthwhile content for their site, such that Internet users
will be searching for their site by name, and not clicking on
its link by accident. For best results, have the service add
the nofollow attribute to links that other users themselves
created, such as those within their comment, and the link
attached to the name of user who wrote the comment. Other areas
where the attribute can be used include visitor statistic
sections, guestbooks, and referrer lists.

Among the first weblog software creators that signed up for
this service are LiveJournal, Blogger, Wordpress, Flickr, and
MSN Spaces. Users of these blog services and others need not do
anything themselves. The free blog host only needs to keep the
attribute version updated to ensure its full effect.

This concept of having better control over outgoing links isn't
all new, however. Forward-thinking programmers have been able to
devise ways to prevent search engine spiders from detecting
outgoing links for quite a while. Yet this new Google tag gives
power to the common website owner over his or her site's
outgoing links.
Some may have doubts on the effectiveness of this new service.
One notion is that this will not be fully efficient unless it
becomes a default option for bloggers and webmasters. Perhaps
it also does not help that there are skeptics, not to mention
dishonest users that will try to get past this obstacle and
even devise a tougher-to-beat approach to comment spamming and
link campaigns.

In addition, those who do gain in search engine ranking through
referral links by those who really, wholeheartedly support their
site have the most to lose. The possibility of search page
rankings being a thing of the past presents itself in this
scenario. Then again, it would not hurt to pose a challenge to
those whose sites and products have yet to gain popularity.
Perhaps businesses need to make a habit of improving, and have
faith that those Internet users, who know exactly what they are
looking for on the web, will find them eventually and be
satisfied with what they have to offer. Besides, the really
great ideas are the one that stand the test of time.


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