September
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.
Q: How does a link change?
A: Any link that a user can create on your site automatically gets a new “nofollow” attribute. So if a blog spammer previously added a comment like
Visit my discount pharmaceuticals
site.
That comment would be transformed to
Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.
Q: What types of links should get this attribute?
A: We encourage you to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute anywhere that users can add links by themselves, including within comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists. Comment areas receive the most attention, but securing every location where someone can add a link is the way
to keep spammers at bay.
Q: Should I put rel=”nofollow” on the link to my comments page?
A: Probably not, because lots of interesting discussion can happen there. Also, if other people link to your comments page, a spider can follow that link and find any spam that’s lurking on
the comments page.
The best places to add this attribute are the actual links that other people can create. So on this page, for instance, only the links within comments and the link immediately
after “Posted by:” would get the rel=”nofollow” attribute.
Q: Do individual bloggers need to do anything?
A: Probably not. Updating the software that generates these pages will ensure that most bloggers get these changes automatically.
Q: Is this a blog-only change?
A: No. We think any piece of software that allows others to
add links to an author’s site (including guestbooks, visitor stats, or referrer
lists) can use this attribute. We’re working primarily with blog software makers
for now because blogs are such a common target.
Got more questions? Email commentspam at google.com. As we spot more areas where spammers still abuse the Web, we’ll contact the appropriate people in order to keep fighting comment spam.
Related posts:
- How to Use No-Follow Tags
- Google Nofollow Link Attribute
- Linkbaiting for Page Rank & Link Popularity
- Build Links By Building Profiles - Link Building Tip
- Link Building Basics
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