Interesting to folks using "Blogs" for links and advertising ~

[Mark]

Interesting to folks using "Blogs" for links ~

http://www.google.com/googleblog/


Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Preventing comment spam
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.

We hope the web software community will quickly adopt this attribute and we're pleased that a number of blog software makers have already signed on:

Brad Fitzpatrick - LiveJournal
Dave Winer - Scripting News
Anil Dash - Six Apart
Steve Jenson - Blogger
Matt Mullenweg - WordPress
Stewart Butterfield - Flickr
Anthony Batt - Buzznet
David Czarnecki - blojsom
Rael Dornfest - Blosxom
Mike Torres - MSN Spaces

We've also discussed this issue with colleagues at our fellow search engines and would like to thank MSN Search and Yahoo! for supporting this initiative. Here are a few guidelines for anyone else who wants to join the cause.

http://www.google.com/googleblog/ <--- See the rest of the Article

 

[zaros64]

wow...thats weird.... maybe its a good idea though

 

[Anthony]

If Google follows the specification then it will essentially nullify comment spam and links.

 

[billinchina]

When all the forums and blogs start using that, it should make link sales rise.

 

[Wesley]

Wow, that's wonderful ^_^ Come to think of it, why'd it take them so long? Lol, you'd think they'd try to see to it that sites where you could post didn't help people with increasing their rank simply by spamming.

 

[Mark]

I've already heard of several folks Marketleap links falling dramatically - and checked in at a few places selling links this week ... Several didn't have any "General Category" type links available.

We'll See ~

 

[QBert]

how is the (rel="nofollow") tag used? wouldent it just be <a herf like normal html?

 

[Redleg]

how is the (rel="nofollow") tag used? wouldent it just be <a herf like normal html?

<a href="http://www.yoursite .com" rel="nofollow">Yoursite</a>

use it like that, and google's not supposed to follow (index) that link..