January 19, 2005
Search Engines Make a Move Against Blog Comment Spam
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The Internet Marketing / Webmaster community is all aflutter about the recent Search Engine industry move to elminate comment spam. MSN, Yahoo and Google have all jumped on board by announcing their support for a standard method to allow webmasters to say, “Oh my! I have no way of controlling who posts links on my site. Please don’t count any Page Rank from the links on my site …â€.
The major search engines have announced their support for detecting a special tag included in a link, rel=nofollow. That renders a link useless for the purpose of transferring PageRank or link popularity, in other words, a vote of importance to search engine algorithms when one site links to another site.
Is it me, or is this the first time that the search engines are putting control into the hands of webmasters over which specific items on a page are valid and pertinent to search engines? Not to mention that the big players have collaborated on the issue. To me, that is the big story.
Sure, webmasters have for a long time been able to specify that search engine crawlers should stay away from certain sections of a website, or even specific pages. But down to the granularity of a specific link on a page? For some reason, this doesn’t sit right with me.
Maybe that’s because this seems like the wrong approach to solving the problem of comment spam.
How about simply taking responsibility for what’s published on your website? How about developing and using blog software that allows you to do so easily?
What Do They Expect to Come of This?
What’s the goal of this move? Is it to discourage and deter the blog spammers? I just don’t see that happening. There are thousands upon thousands of blogs out there that won’t implement the link change, plenty of incentive for the blog spammers to continue their activity for years more. The easiest method is still to spam indiscriminately. What’s the difference?
In fact, this has the potential to make the problem worse as spammers must get more comments out there to achieve the same results.
I just don’t understand. If you’re going to spend the time updating blog software and creating a solution that requires blog owners to install this update, why is it so difficult to create a solution that prevents automated bots from submitting a comment form automatically without human involvement. This isn’t a new problem. For example, any website that has valuable data is a target for data mining. The solution to that is to ensure that you’re dealing with a person.
- CAPTCHA check: Make the user type in the letters and numbers presented in a graphic that’s impossible (for now?) for a computer to read.
- Registration Required: Make the users register if they want to post.
Look at Overture and PPC search engines, Registrars with their whois and domain look up features, even LinkShare in order to stymie the services who automatically look up reporting data for affiliates (one of the more misguided moves in the history of affiliate networks, but that’s a different story). They’ve all addressed this problem with mandatory registrations and CAPTCHA checks.
Webmaster Abuse
Not only is this unlikely stop comment spam, there’s another problem.
Well, it’s the same problem, with a side effect. Webmasters now have the direct ability to neuter links. In a PR hoarding manoeuvre, however beneficial to them, webmasters will code their links with the rel=nofollow tag. Doesn’t this break the whole concept of link popularity and page rank? Here’s an authority site with all sorts of links out to sites of a similar subject. But wait, we can’t count them because the webmaster neutered the links.
Side note: This neutering is already possible, but it does take some technical effort and knowledge on the part of the webmaster.
Throwing the Baby Out With the Bathwater
And aren’t there ever any useful links that are posted in blog comments? This eliminates one of the greatest incentives to commenting in blogs, as well as a significantly larger number of quality links than the bad links that you’re eliminating. As if this feature didn’t have anything at all to do with the success of Blogs in the first place.
Final Thought
This all sounds remarkably similar to another industry group that got together a few years ago to address a burning industry topic (affiliates stepping on other affiliates). In fact, they (ok, we) solved the problem partially with a flag in a link, namely appending afsrc=1 to a link. Spooky. The big difference is this time there doesn’t seem to be a foolish industry player who bailed out at the last minute in a PR manoeuvre of a different sort.
More info
Read more about this from Danny Sullivan’s Blog and BlogHerald.com, both of whom scooped the story.
A very old blog entry from a frank and frustrated Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo, is an interesting prelude to the whole matter.
What I feel is that you can’t stop spammers from getting their motives done as long as you’ve a human moderation system available. Spamming controllable as long the spammer is using an artificial intelligence. Incase they are the humans sitting on computer searching for specific blogs and adding their links to improve their website’s back links, it simply gets uncontrollable. Let me tell you, even a check like CAPTCHA won’t work in this case.
So all the jiant search engines, ones like yahoo, MSN, and GOOGLE of course will have to look into this factor. Humans as spammer not artificial spammers. It’s easy to control later not former.