boakes.org

A couple of years ago, a web page with an open comment form would have been used for commenting intelligently and considerately on the subject at hand or sending a message to the page author. Then, with the advent of Google’s page rank system, comment forms became the subject of massive misuse, because pagerank gave a higher rank to web pages based on the number of times they appeared on other sites. Spammers would use automated tools to mercilessly link and relink their sites on any and every open form. Having a high pagerank means coming first in search results, which for a commercial site equates to more sales: so comment spamming had rich rewards.

To combat this, web page authors have built all kinds of systems into their web sites, but none have been universally effective. The recent introduction of the rel=”nofollow” directive may be paying off, and the days of the web spammer may be numbered.

For non-tech-heads rel=”nofollow” tells Google and other search engines that the owner of a web page site does not recommend the linked page - it’s not a negative recommendation, but it’s not a positive recommendation either.

Just now I saw a comment that got through all the automated spam killers that I have on this site. It said:

Great site http://example.com <a href=”http://example.net” rel=”nofollow”>example</a> [url=http://example.org]example[/url]

This is interesting because it shows that web spammers are having to worry about the best tactics to get themselves listed, where previously they would be able to spam just about any web page with an open comment form. Here the spammer was testing my site (and probably several thousand others at the sime time) to work out if it’s possible to get a link displayed, using three common techniques.

Sorry spammer, your days of revenue are limited. Go and get a job and become a worthwhile part of society.