p2pnet.net News:- “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’,” says Google on its mainstream blog.

It goes on, “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.”

Google also thanks MSN Search and Yahoo! “for supporting this initiative”.

However, Netimperative has Jason Duke, director at SEO company Strange Logic, saying, “I speak with professional link spammers daily and most of them are laughing heartily at this announcement.

“The reality, as they see it, is that this is a PR exercise by the search engines so they are seen to be doing something to combat the problem. They know that for this to work people will have to download and install a new version of their blog software and that the majority of blogs out there are started with the best intentions but then left to rot - and gather link spam.

“I expect to see a huge increase in blog and forum spam rather than a reduction over the coming months.”

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See:-
mainstream blog - Preventing comment spam, Google Blog, January 18, 2005
laughing heartily - Google attack on comment spam could backfire, Netimperative, January 19, 2005

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