Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Comment Spam

Since I post a lot of links to FightSplog I wanted to point out something since some visitors to that blog are concerned by the amount of comment spams. He purposely does not clean spam from his comments.

I don't either, but I use Blogger's Word Verification CAPTCHA that cuts down on most spam. He doesn't believe using them. I think they are bad too, but I would rather not have my comments overloaded with garbage.

Spamming antispam blogs is pretty stupid and we like to point that out by example. Any spammer who is expecting PageRank from comment spamming Blogspot has no clue what they are doing. Blogspot uses nofollow tags on links in comments.

But of course, spammer stupidity was an expected limitation of nofollow's usefulness. I was excited when it was first announced, but quickly realized it wasn't really going to solve anything. Spammers are too stupid and lazy to care.

But for a normal blog you should not leave spam comments even though they aren't benifiting the spammer. , so if you don't clean the little you get now you are going to get a lot later.

Comments:
Actually, there's a little spammy loophole in Blogger comments: although links within the comment do have rel=nofollow, the link on the comment author's name doesn't.

While comment spammers often use Blogger profiles to post spam from, they haven't yet caught on to the fact that using an Other identity would give them a free PageRank-carrying keyword link back to their crapola...
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...like for example this one.
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FWIW, I pointed the same out to Blogger Support a few days ago; no reply yet.
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That example still links to your Blogger profile. That isn't really going to help spammers.
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But that one points to chongqed.org and is missing the nofollow. This is a big problem. I really hope blogger fixes it, but I have my doubts. Unless you are Chris Pirillo or Mark Cuban, blogger doesn't seem to listen very well.
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