Comment Spam Defense Now A Full-Fledged Web Standard
According to Jeremy Zawodny on the Yahoo blog, the new “nofollow” tag is not just a Google solution; the comment spam defense is being implemented by every major player in the search / blogging universe. Implementing the new standard are: saerch engines Google, Yahoo, MSN, as well as blog software Blogger (from Google), TypePad, MovableType, LiveJournal (from Six Apart), MSN Spaces and WordPress.
Six Apart explains that they were approached by the Google Search team, who came up with the idea. TypePad subscribers will see “nofollow” implemented automatically in the next 24 hours. Movable Type has a plugin to install for it, available here. Finally, LiveJournal will be implementing it, but only for non-friends (which is actually kind of nice).
The Google Blog says there are other partners in this as well, including Manila (instructions here), Flickr, Buzznet, Blojsom and Blosxom. Google says this attribute should be placed anywhere links are user-created, including blog comments, guestbooks, visitor stats, and referral lists. Also, showing how worried they still are about spam, Google lists the email address to ask questions about the feature, but write it as “commentspam at google.com”.
The MSN Search Weblog’s Ken Moss adds that he was emailed just this morning by “Paul,” an engineer at Google, who explained the attribute and their plans. MSN’s Search Champs group suggested this months ago, and MSN has been looking into the possibility for a while now. With Google beating them to it with this announcement, MSN will simply implement Google’s version over the coming weeks with theMSNBot crawler. MSN Spaces will begin using it soon as well. They also made a wiki.
UPDATE: Danny Sullivan says AskJeeves “is still considering the tag”. Considering? A little late. Everybody’s already on board.
Does your blog software use it instead of the Google rediction? I’ll test it now. Feel free to delete this comment afterwards.
Comment by Noam | January 19, 2005
Yeah, we’re either going to develop our own plugin to implement it, or wait for the official WordPress implementation. For the moment, we still have our redirection, so at least we have some protection.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | January 19, 2005