[thelist] rel="nofollow"

[Matt Warden]

Marc,

On Tue, 01 Feb 2005 22:40:15 -0400, M. Seyon <evoltlist at delime.com> wrote:
> In an email about that blaster worm/OS brouhaha Matt posted
> >Google supports adding rel="nofollow" to anchors, and others (Yahoo!,
> >MSN, etc.) said they were going to support it at some point as well.
> >It might be something to consider if you have a blog and dislike
> >comment spam.
> >
> >Of course, there is something wrong with telling a search engine
> >spider not to spider links in comments on your blog, as it will
> >obviously mean that legitimate links are not followed either.
> >
> >Still, it might be something you consider doing.
> 
> Not knowing a whole lot about how comment spammers actually work, how would
> this help? Do the bots typically operate by finding your comments pages via
> a search engine?

The whole reason for comment spam is that it bumps up google's
pagerank and other such methods, which are based on sites linking to
their site. Adding this attribute eliminates the benefit of adding
comment spam to the site using the attribute on links in comments.

-- 
Matt Warden
Miami University
Oxford, OH, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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