Finally, The Best Solution of Comment Spam Problem

That’s why I love [Google](http://www.google.com). They came up with [pagerank](http://www.google.com/technology/) algorithm which has been proven to be good. And then when people tries to abuse it, they come up first with the solution. They worked with community and even their competitors to solve this annoying problem.

This is from [an entry from their Googleblog](http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html).

> If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

Die spammers die!

Of course, that wouldn’t stop those annoying prick who post comment spams whose sole purpose is to annoy the hell out of the blog owner. But at least, they won’t get rewarded by posting those crap. It will be interesting to see how the dark side respond. But the third rule of the [rules of spam](http://bruce.pennypacker.org/spamrules.html) is “Spammers are stupid”. I don’t think they will notice this move by Google for some time. So, don’t put out your spam countermeasures yet!

And don’t get excited yet. Spammers were born to make our lives miserable. I’m sure we will have more problems from them in the future. If it is not in the form of comment spam, it will be in another form. Trust me on this.

**Update**: there is already [a WordPress plugin](http://wordpress.org/support/topic.php?id=21187) which implements this

12 comments

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  2. *sigh*. I hate spam. I want my 1995-1998 internet era back! No spam, mailing list was still a nice respectable establishment, email is amazingly clean.

    Btw, Hell is preparing a new level for spammer.

  3. kalo kata gue tindakan google ini bisa jadi menghasilkan backfire yang lebih parah. skrg bukan hanya di komen, tapi di setiap link yg kita ga pengen ngasih PR ke website yg kita link itu bisa kita tambahin nofollow.

    misalnya yg positif, kalo kita ngelink ke website AA jangan kuatir ngasih nilai dengan link itu, tambahin aja nofollow.

    yg negatif dan kacaw adalah gimana kalo semua orang webmaster ga rela ngasih nilai lebih buat semua website, dipasanglah nofollow disemua link di websitenya, blogroll, referal, pokoknya semua link dipasangin nofollow.

    yg rugi jadinya google sendiri, algorithma PR dia yg *tergantung* pada siapa ngelink siapa jadi ga berguna lagi.

  4. yup, kerugian pasti ada, tapi paling tidak sekarang google bisa membedakan link mana yang ‘authoritative’ yang berasal dari pemilik situs, dan link mana yang tidak ‘authoritative’, yaitu link yang bisa dibuat oleh sembarang orang.

    nanti kalau ada yang abuse nofollow, tinggal pintar-pintarnya google mengakalinya. misalnya kalau ada situs yang banyak link masuk, tapi semua link keluar dikasih nofollow bisa di’hukum’. sekarang pun situs-situs yang melakukan spamming keyword juga dihukum oleh google.

  5. In my opinion, nofollow is not the right way to limit comment spam. A simple use of captchas is a good enough deterrent.. while it may inconvenience genuine people, but there’s a fair price to pay. Also, it could be programmatically arranged that people on your blogroll would be able to comment without the need for validating captcha text….

    BTW nice design for your blog :)

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