NoFollowTag

ThoughtStorms Wiki

Google supporting a No Follow tag to disincentivate blog comment (and maybe wiki) spam.

http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

BillSeitz:z2005-01-17-GoogleNoFollowTagSpam

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050118-204728

DaveWiner : http://www.bloggercon.org/2005/01/15#a3294

SunirShah, sceptical : http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?NoFollow

: me too, I buy these arguments – PhilJones

Discussion

(copied from SpammingThoughtStorms )

The No Follow tag seems like it might work for BLOG CommentSpam, not sure about wiki's though....

The multiple http regex filter on Meatball seems to be working well?

– kk

kk, it is interesting that Google and other search engines are proposing a new rel attribute nofollow which site owners can use to mark individual links as "unvetted" links. That feature certainly makes sense in a blog where links in the post are approved by the site owner, while links in the comments to a post may be spam. However, wiki's probably don't need the feature. Search engines have long supported a mechanism to mark all links on a page as "nofollow" links, which is what one usually wishes to do with wikis. I while back I wrote a patch UseMod

that implemented the robots meta tag for UseMod wiki. In any case, I think the introduction of this new attribute is probably too late to discourage comment spam or WikiSpam. There are probably hundreds or more likely thousands of blogs and wikis that that will never be updated to use the new attribute and I don't think spammers will bother to check if particular blogs/wikis are using the feature - it is easier for them to just hit all blogs/wikis indiscriminately.

– RichardP

:: I don't agree the rel="nofollow" attribute is very useful, because this enables you to choose which links that should be followed. This means I can still allow edits and people can add external links, and if I approve of those links I can just remove the nofollow attribute. Right know I just have a file with all the links that I approve of. Each time usemod wants to print an external URL it first checks this file, if it's not in there I will add an rel="nofollow" attribute. It need to be more efficient if you have a high trafic wiki, but I usually get 10 edits per hour, so it's ok. – ErikJohansson

I don't think I agree that you want to treat all external links in a wiki as NoFollow. Another approach you could take would be to use ZWiki's model of treating Appends differently from Edits. Then you could open the wiki only to Appends (yikes, I had it backwards in an earlier version) (I know this isn't ideal), and strip all "http://" out of text being Appended, which would keep the links from being rendered.

–BillSeitz

My take on this: The best thing about Googles new 'feature' is the amount of publicity this is getting. When some odd wiki anounces that it has a special robots.txt or a nofollow metatag, nobody will notice. But if Google announces to do something against comment/wiki spam, people do notice and perhaps even some spammers will read it. I just hope that they assume that wiki engines will follow what blog engines are doing right now. –Manni