Spam, spam, spam, spam – email spam, comment spam, trackback spam, usenet spam, referrer spam – it's no wonder we're vitamin-deprived.
I won't speak for the rest of the world (it's not my week, anyway), but my core issue with spam is that it exists. That's also my core issue with cockroaches, and the resemblance does not end there.* It's not that the spammers get pagerank, or that foolish people order drugs or fetish objects from them. No, my beef is that spammers insist on parasitizing my resources for their own purpose, and polluting them in the process.
Google recently came up with what they think is a solution, and pitched it hard to weblog developers: a new tag for links. This is it:
rel="nofollow"
Their thinking is if weblog devs update their code to auto-include that tag in any link created within a comment, Google will tell their robot to ignore the link when it does its spider thing on the rest of the site. The devs, naturally, nodded their heads in unison and sallied forth to implement this tag as fast as their fingers could type.
Nifty solution, eh? Well, yes, if one wants to solve Google's problems. Personally, I have my hands full with my own, and this nofollow thing doesn't even begin to touch any of them. More, it implies that the people who comment on my site are on par with a guy who breeds cockroaches in the basement. <div class="babywithbathwater">They might not be spammers now, but you never know, do ya?</div>
In fact, the only webloggers who should be using this tag are the kind of webloggers who really should seek out a fully hosted option, the ones who will not, or cannot, police their own sites. Not that it will help them, Superfund couldn't help them. But it will help Google. And really, that's what it's for.
WordPress 1.5, natch, comes with this nofollow silliness enabled by default. I've ripped it out at the roots. Mi googlejuice es su googlejuice.
* Remember that scene in Pacific Heights where the evil renter guy breeds the cockroaches? Anyone else get nightmares from that? That's my mental image of a spammer, right there.
pushing out the speakers: Mizike from the album "Adventures in Afropea I" by Zap Mama
25 Comments
Ah yes Spammers – today I had this oh so sweet and polite “lady” come into our online sales chat with me at work who said “she” worked for a company that sends out lots of bulk email and could they rent 40 servers from us. “She” then proceeded to tell me they send 2,000,000 pices of email a day and get 200 complaints a day , and oh by the way we are listed in Spam haus but that won’t be a problem will it?
Oh no “lady” not at all but you know I think I need to run this by my boss so why don’t you send me an email and I’ll do that
minutes later an email appears – the name on the email account is a guy but the poor gender confused sender signed it with a woman’s name :)
The crud I have to deal with every day :)
fyi: I only asked “her” to send an email so as to get rid of “her” in chat and quit wasting my time
Lure her/him into your store. Promise beer if you have to, or pie. Whatever. Once there, drop a server rack on its head.
Damage to the rack is bound to be tax-deductable, considering.
Gah, spam. I’m grateful I don’t get more than I do, both email- and blog-wise, but it’s still a pain in the a–. And, unlike trolls, you can’t even play with it.
I have long adored your “trained elephants” warning, btw.
Nah, that’s true. About the third or fourth ‘please get my millions out of Nigeria’ round, it’s all just not really funny anymore. And the fake trackback attempts I was getting for the last few weeks were foul, beyond the outer limits of bad taste. I obviously didn’t clear some of them out soon enough, as hapless perverts are even now searching my photolog for ‘gr*nny s*x’. [vowels self-removed] One of them even plugged the phrase into the local search box; he couldn’t believe, out of all those pictures, one or two weren’t just what his lizard brain ordered.
Get a life, guys. Or drop real cash for an Annie Liebowitz coffee table tome and spend some quality time offline.
I have long adored your "trained elephants" warning, btw.
Thank you! Didja click on the elephant link? I’m right chuffed about that, I wanted to put up a blacklist page, as being fair play, but didn’t want it searchable, due to the above-mentioned Iss-ewe, nor did I want to trouble myself keeping it up to date. So I knocked out a function to dynamically update the lists, and solved all my problems. (preen) (prrrrr)
Oh, very cool! (I hadn’t clicked on the link before.) Definitely something to preen about.
My current minor irritation is a rather pathetic little troll. It’s so wimpy, it’s almost cute — but not quite. It’s very stupid, and so far its worst insult is “hippy” (which it seems to think is a profoundly traumatizing thing to accuse someone of being. Uh, no.) I’m hoping it gets bored soon; the foolish thing forgets that I can block IPs.
You’ve got a troll? I think I had one, once, but I took him seriously and he went away. I haven’t seen any since, at least, not with staying power. I think it would worry me, a bit. This isn’t exactly a high-profile site, so someone trolling it would have to be absolutely desperate.
No, I just get perverts via search engines. But then, doesn’t everyone?
I agree with you. nofollow is definitely not the solution. I posted on this topic on January 24th in my blog – To "nofollow" or not, that is the question.
And to reiterate I wouldn’t adopt nofollow as it is a disincentivizes comment posting. Neither would I stop providing active links from comments, unless absolutely forced to do so.
[edited by pericat; link to post inserted]
Angsuman, your link went away. I wonder if that’s something I did?
testing link
————–
okay, that one works… a mystery. Angsuman, I’ve edited your comment to link to your article. For some reason, it didn’t initially. Dunno if that was you typing or something I did wrong behind the curtain.
I wouldn’t adopt nofollow as it is a disincentivizes comment posting
Hmmm… Maybe I post comments for different reasons than other people, but I don’t see “no follow” as affecting comments at all.
I don’t post comments to drive people to my website, or to gin up traffic to my website, but to share insight or ideas. I put links in because it would be nice if people came to have conversations on my weblog, but if they don’t that’s fine too.
If someone is posting comments on my site solely to drive traffic to their own website, then I’m going to have to wonder about the quality of those comments.
Then again, I love to debate for the sake of debating, so you’ll have to take that into consideration.
If “nofollow” means that the majority of people who are posting comments are doing to to engage in conversation–is this really a bad thing?
Michelle
If someone is posting comments on my site solely to drive traffic to their own website, then I’m going to have to wonder about the quality of those comments.
That’s what I do. I comment on your site solely to drive traffic to my own. Darn you for being so entertaining in your own right that this ploy of mine is doomed to failure every time!
Seriously though, I might wonder about how badly such a commenter and I would get on in person, but if the comment itself adds to the conversation, then the commenter’s more human motivations are neither here nor there, IMO. Also, I do post now and again on subjects that are of, shall we say, limited appeal. I can understand why people for whom those topics are more of an ongoing focus might comment quickly, with a link or three, and wander off again. If they pull traffic from my readership, it’s not like something’s being taken from me. Rather, I (and anyone else who happens on the post and its comments) have been left a permanent hook to a site with perhaps a deeper, more focused, insight into the subject.
If "nofollow" means that the majority of people who are posting comments are doing so to engage in conversation, is this really a bad thing?
I’m not sure how that would be the result, or even one of the results. It might, in places, be a side effect. It’s not one that I would be in a position to notice, having as I do a comparatively low-traffic weblog. dreaming the st. roch gets more hits, but then it’s chock full of hard data and isn’t, strictly speaking, a weblog. Anyway, the point is that as far as I can tell, people who comment here are already doing so to engage in conversation. Their numbers or percentage aren’t likely to increase if I chose to retain ‘nofollow’.
(The rest of this screed I’ll put in a new post. It’s getting kind of involved. Hell, it may never see the light of day.)
I knew that you Canadians were self-serving. Coming to my site just to entice my readers away! Where would the world be if all people who had botany inpsired flags acted that way?!
waitasecond… Are there any other countires with botany inspired flags? Must go look.
But back the the real subject…. nofollow simply means google will ignore it, yes? It doesn’t mean that visitors to the site won’t follow the links, so I guess I’m failing to see the harm.
Of course, I could care less as to whether my site is ranked high for anything other than my name, so perhaps that’s the problem? (pause) Maybe this is coming out all wrong and I’d better just go finish that flag search….
I knew that you Canadians were self-serving. Coming to my site just to entice my readers away! Where would the world be if all people who had botany inpsired flags acted that way?!
I’ve got three of your readers tied up in my storage locker right now.
waitasecond– Are there any other countires with botany inspired flags? Must go look.
There must be more. Though it’s true most countries inclined to the nature approach pick carnivores or reptiles…
But back the the real subject. nofollow simply means google will ignore it, yes? It doesn’t mean that visitors to the site won’t follow the links, so I guess I’m failing to see the harm.
There’s nothing that limits this tag to google. If it were merely noticed by search engines, that would go to lessen the entire connectivity that is the best thing about the web, that makes it what it is. However, if all search engines pay attention to it, and I believe they’re already being programmed to do so, and more and more browser and other kinds of net software are updated to do something or not do something when they encounter such a tag, that could get unpleasant. Right now site owners are being told that they should blanket-implement it, that it will fight spam, that it’s a good thing. When it turns out not to fight spam, yet those sites will still have ‘nofollows’ littering their pages, ready and waiting for something to come along that reacts to them in ways the site owners did not agreed to.
Another thing: right now, when I do a google-search, I’m pretty sure that what comes back includes a sifting and ranking of the totality of what’s out there. I can kiss that goodbye once ‘nofollow’ gets entrenched.
I’ve got three of your readers tied up in my storage locker right now.
THAT explains where Erin’s been…. :)
But back to nofollow…
It seems to me, that with nofollow, what google will find when it searches my site will be the content that I put up, and will ignore what everyone else says, yes? What I’m thinking is that in a way, I’m responsible for the content of the comments on my site. So if I’m having a discussion with my friend who happens to be a Republican, that content will be different from what I post typically–it’ll be both sides of the story, so to speak, and it may (possibly) contain links to site that I disagree with. (Anything is possible) So am I not then, directly or indirectly, endorsing those sites?
Sure, I have the right to remove comments and links as I see fit, but nofollow seems an easy way to make certain that I’m not indirectly or accidentally endorsing something with which I disagree.
Plus it might serve to discourage comment spammers, which is an added plus. :)
So I guess I’m having a difficult time seeing the downside of this. Blogs will still be googlefodder, only the links posted in the comments will be hidden, so to speak, from search engines.
Guess I’m looking at it from the point of view of someone who has been quite frustrated by forums (that I can’t see no less, because they’re “private”!) and blog comments coming up in my searches.
Sure, I have the right to remove comments and links as I see fit, but nofollow seems an easy way to make certain that I’m not indirectly or accidentally endorsing something with which I disagree.
Using nofollow to express one’s dislike of a particular link is kind of mealy-mouthed. Hell, if it’s a link you don’t want to associate with, delete the anchors, annotate your edit so readers know it wasn’t an accident, and be done with it.
Conversely, if it’s a link you think well of, and the great majority of links from your real comments will be of that nature, you’ve no way to remove the nofollow if you’re using a weblogging tool that has implemented them wholesale. As long as the link is there, every time you rebuild your site (if MT), it will add the ‘nofollow’. You can’t put every site you like in your blogroll, and some links really need the context of the comment thread, anyway.
Plus it might serve to discourage comment spammers, which is an added plus. :)
Yeah? I hear putting food away promptly discourages roaches. Except, of course, in places where there are roaches. Then it merely contains their exuberance within semi-tolerable bounds.
Guess I’m looking at it from the point of view of someone who has been quite frustrated by forums (that I can’t see no less, because they’re ‘private’!) and blog comments coming up in my searches.
Um, neither of these frustrations will in any conceivable way be alleviated by even 100% implementation of nofollow. What will happen is that any link a commenter uses to support or round out her ideas will not be followed and tagged or ranked as having any importance within that context. That’s a big deal to me. Pretend unlocking the air is an academic site. (Boggles the mind, I know, but try.) Serious discussions happen here. The comments are scattered throughout with links back to primary or secondary resources.
With nofollow implemented, not even by the site owner, but by the blogging software’s design team, that discussion, and the sources its contributors used, will not be ranked together by search engines. The only way a later researcher would have of knowing those connections had been made, would be if she found and read that comment thread, and saw and followed the links herself.
This is exactly the work search engines are meant to do, and it’s being chucked out the back of the sleigh under the impresson that all spammers care about is page rank. At least as important to them are click-throughs. Nofollow is no kind of threat to click-throughs, but if a site owner is naive enough to think it is, they’ll soon find out differently when their sites are covered in spam, all marked ‘nofollow’, you bet, but not a one inoperable.
Using nofollow to express one’s dislike of a particular link is kind of mealy-mouthed. Hell, if it’s a link you don’t want to associate with, delete the anchors, annotate your edit so readers know it wasn’t an accident, and be done with it…Conversely, if it’s a link you think well of, and the great majority of links from your real comments will be of that nature, you’ve no way to remove the nofollow
But that’s equitable. I endorse *neither* positive nor negative links. And to be honest, because I’m NOT Making Light, if someone really interesting comes up in the comments, I’ll usually make a post about it, because I assume that most people perusing my site haven’t read the comments. So then important stuff does move to main posts.
Of course everyone runs their blog differently, and if but some strange circumstance, commenting did take off on my site, I might do things differently. But it’s hard to tell from here.
Pretend unlocking the air is an academic site. (Boggles the mind, I know, but try.) Serious discussions happen here. The comments are scattered throughout with links back to primary or secondary resources.
BUT if this was an academic site, then you could simply refrain from implementing nofollow.
As long as the link is there, every time you rebuild your site (if MT), it will add the ‘nofollow’. You can’t put every site you like in your blogroll, and some links really need the context of the comment thread, anyway.
BUT, in MT nofollow is still, like Blacklist, an add-in. So it’s not adding nofollow into my comments will shee nill she. AND, the other comment options that have been added in MT are all optional. Including of course the options to use comments at all.
And to me, that’ is a lot of what it comes down to. There are sites out there that don’t allow commenting at all–some in response to spam, some for other reasons. If we don’t get a handle on comment spam, then more people are going to take the solution of turning off comments in their sites completely. This, to my mind, is the far greater danger.
So I see where you’re coming from–I agree that implementing nofollow wholesale without the blogowner’s say so is wrong. But from the view of someone using MT, that’s not likely to be an issue, as all comments options are, well, options.
I endorse *neither* positive nor negative links.
If your position toward links posted in comments at your site is effectively neutral, I do not understand why you would be concerned about appearing to endorse even a problematic link.
BUT if this was an academic site, then you could simply refrain from implementing nofollow.
I would have to. Nor would it be a difficult decision to make, since nofollow does nothing, no thing, not an iota of anything that is positive or useful or helpful, for me as a weblogger, a website owner, or as a member of the internet community at large, or just as someone who does occasionally do research and who bitterly resents anyone else deciding that certain otherwise-public connections, such as those made by commenters in weblogs, aren’t quite good enough to notice or record. Next thing you know it’ll be weblogs themselves.
BUT, in MT nofollow is still, like Blacklist, an add-in.
For TypePad, it’s there, like it or not. For MT, true, it’s a plugin. But it’s an all-or-nothing plugin– you can’t turn it on or off for for any given thread, as you can for commenting or trackbacks themselves. Though there’s nothing to stop someone writing a third-party plugin that would be a bit more selective.
There are sites out there that don’t allow commenting at all-some in response to spam, some for other reasons. If we don’t get a handle on comment spam, then more people are going to take the solution of turning off comments in their sites completely.
Nofollow does not address or mitigate comment spam. It will not keep spam from being posted. (Blacklist, otoh…) If a site has turned off comments due to being spammed mercilessly, and the owner installs nofollow and turns comments back on, it will not stop that site from being spammed once more. It is not a spam-prevention tool.
I’m all for getting a handle on comment spam. Nofollow ain’t it, and worse, it takes attention and dev time away from those efforts that might, eventually, prove effective.
If your position toward links posted in comments at your site is effectively neutral, I do not understand why you would be concerned about appearing to endorse even a problematic link.
Because what I believe, and the preception of what I believe, are frequently Not the Same.
Though there’s nothing to stop someone writing a third-party plugin that would be a bit more selective.
Which would be a Very Good Idea.
Mind you, this is all theoretical discussion on my part. I haven’t enabled nofollow for my weblog, nor am I in a huge rush to do so–MT Blacklist does an admirable job (once I got it working anyway). But I just don’t see the reason for your (and if this is an incorrect word, the problem is in my perception) disdain of nofollow. I think that if it is implemented that it could serve discourage comment spammers. I guess I have a wait and see approach. I’m not for it, but neither am I against it. (I’m not sure that was quite clear in my comments) But right now I think that if it works it will be a good thing.
It is not a spam-prevention tool.
I agree that right now it isn’t, but I think there is a possibility that if implemented widely enough it could help.
In other words, I see what you’re saying, but I’m not certain I’m ready to agree with you, until I’ve seen it fail?
But I just don’t see the reason for your (and if this is an incorrect word, the problem is in my perception) disdain of nofollow.
That’s rather discouraging. I’ve used a great deal of words so far in an effort to clarify how and why I think nofollow a bad idea – improperly implemented, poorly conceived, etc. A link with ‘nofollow’ slipped in is thereby labelled substandard, by any application, not just search engines, that is written to take notice of that attribute. It will not matter that the vast majority are not spam at all, that they’re either pertinent to the subject or are identity-related, they’ll all be tagged in a way that’s been widely advertised to mean “spam”. How is this good?
You and I have a choice about how our tools work, but a considerable number of webloggers are using hosted solutions: they won’t have any kind of choice. How is this good?
Google and 6A say widespread use of this tag will fight spam by discouraging spammers. Their rhetoric is strictly limited to only perceived benefits. Not a word about how possible side-effects might be addressed or how misuse might be avoided or minimized. No hints that one might want to limit where and when it’s applied. Of course, such a conversation might go:
Google: Use this tag! It’ll keep spammers from spamming your site!
Weblogger: Okay. Where?
Google: In the links people leave in your comments.
Weblogger: How does that keep spammers away?
Google: It’s like garlic. Spammers see you putting that tag in your commenters’ links, and they’ll go away.
Weblogger: Why?
Google: Our bot will only rank links that don’t have that attribute.
Weblogger: So shouldn’t it only be used for spam comments?
Google: Well…
Weblogger: But of course, if I know a comment’s spam, why shouldn’t I just delete it? And if I know it’s not spam, why shouldn’t I want you to rank it?
Google: If everybody uses it everywhere, it will work!
Weblogger: How? Spammers don’t read blogs. Their scripts can target a million sites in few hours. They don’t even bother to check if we’re running Blacklist or not. It’s not worth the processing time to them. Why would they care about the rank, if they can still make money on the click-throughs direct from our comment pages?
Google: Okay, so it won’t help the actual spam part of the spam problem. You’re kind of a negative thinker, you know that?
Weblogger: Pass.
if they can still make money on the click-throughs direct from our comment pages?
You mean people actually CLICK on comment spam? And buy stuff?
You’re serious?
That’s… sad.
It also explains our difference of opinions on this.
You’re serious? People actually click on comment spam and buy stuff? The populace is in far worse shape than I thought.
They do, sad to say. And if that spammer interview Making Light and others referenced is any indication, many spammers are paid based on click-through referrals, so purchasing doesn’t even have to take place for them to get paid. Even where that’s not so, there’s a large body of casual surfers who have been told over and over that it’s perfectly safe to order stuff online, but who lack the net-awareness to understand the difference between ordering stuff from eBay or Amazon, and ordering stuff from Joe the Friendly Pharmaceutical Fly-By-Night.
They’re not stupid, however. It’s a context thing. They can recognize dodgy storefronts without even thinking about it, because they have a great deal of experience with good ones. But websites look all alike to them, as do the forms they fill out with their credit card info, down to the little link that explains why this is safe.
I don’t give a rat’s ass about page rank, so far as my sites go. It matters to other website owners, so I don’t want to screw with it if I don’t need to. Using ‘nofollow’ in the way it’s being promoted would screw with it, and could conceivably mess up other linkage stuff down the line, and without benefitting anyone other than Google.
(Actually, I think Google may be sorry in a few months they ever dreamt this up, but I expect they’ll muddle through.)
They’re not stupid, however. It’s a context thing. They can recognize dodgy storefronts without even thinking about it, because they have a great deal of experience with good ones.
I dunno. First thing I say when I teach internet literacy is “If you’ve never heard of them, and they don’t have an actual store you’ve been in, beware.” Of course I then explain that it doesn’t mean that all internet stores are unsafe, just that they need to be far more careful of “Bob’s Shoes” than of Amazon on JC Penny’s. Better paranoid than sorry, I think.
I don’t give a rat’s ass about page rank, so far as my sites go. It matters to other website owners, so I don’t want to screw with it if I don’t need to. Using ‘nofollow’ in the way it’s being promoted would screw with it, and could conceivably mess up other linkage stuff down the line, and without benefitting anyone other than Google.
Y’know, I’ve noticed a couple of times when googling that “Moderately Safe Browsing On” (a good thing, especially at work) and I wonder if somehow that is going to be the key? I’m not certain how, but it would be really nice sometimes to be able to filter out forums and comments from my search results.
I dunno. First thing I say when I teach internet literacy is “If you’ve never heard of them, and they don’t have an actual store you’ve been in, beware.”
That’s what I mean. If they had an online context that was a sophisticated as their off-line understanding, you wouldn’t have to teach “safe browsing.”
it would be really nice sometimes to be able to filter out forums and comments from my search results.
There was talk of a “-blog” flag last year (?) that would do just that. Then Google bought Blogger. Which, btw, according to Tom Raftery, has implemented ‘nofollow’ on a much more limited basis than other CMS developers/hosting services.
“Moderately Safe Browsing”… this sounds like an IE thing. Have you considered Firefox, or perhaps a Mac Mini? :)
"Moderately Safe Browsing"… this sounds like an IE thing. Have you considered Firefox, or perhaps a Mac Mini? :)
Mozilla. All the way. I don’t care for Firefox becuase it’s too much like IE in it’s layout.
And Macs aren’t an option. Except for the laptop, our computers have been pieced together. Mine started out life as a 386–of course it no longer has any of the original parts, but it’s been upgraded a few parts at a time. It’s my understanding that such a thing is not possible with a Mac. That we’d actually have to purchase a whole new computer instead of plunking down $20 to $100 here and there. And the laptop is a Windows machine, because everything else is running Windows or Linux. (One of the husband’s machines is the Linux machine. When he’s gone more than a year without having to wipe the harddrive and start over on the Linux machine, only then will I consider switching. But since my computers been stable for the past, I dunno, five, six years, I have no interest in switching.)
Sorry, I went on a bit there, didn’t I?
The “Moderately Safe” thing was Google. Lemme go check…. Ahhh… it was when I was searching for images via Google that it comes up. My fault.
Mozilla. All the way. I don’t care for Firefox becuase it’s too much like IE in it’s layout.
You think? I hadn’t noticed that particularly. I remember Mozilla as being a slow load, much like Netscape. That may have changed, though. But all that’s a matter of what one likes. I’ll have to d/l Mozilla again, see if it’s speeded up.
It’s my understanding that such a thing is not possible with a Mac. That we’d actually have to purchase a whole new computer instead of plunking down $20 to $100 here and there.
That’s not been my experience. It’s true that suppliers of parts aren’t as numerous, at that this was somewhat more of an issue before internet purchasing became feasible for me, but I’ve never had real trouble upgrading several models component by component.
Added a wireless card to Nola’s tower just last month, and am considering stuffing in a Bluetooth module. If she needed another harddrive, it’d be a breeze to stick in. Laptops are more interesting, but no more interesting than a PC laptop.
I admit I was just yanking your chain, there, but those Minis are sweet boxes. $500 or so gets you a very nice CPU, and your existing peripherals hook right in.
I remember Mozilla as being a slow load, much like Netscape. That may have changed, though. But all that’s a matter of what one likes. I’ll have to d/l Mozilla again, see if it’s speeded up.
I have it load on startup into resident memory (it’s an option, at least in the windows version) that speeds things up tremendously. And since I rarely get on the computer without opening Mozilla, it’s a perfectly good deal.
That’s not been my experience. It’s true that suppliers of parts aren’t as numerous, at that this was somewhat more of an issue before internet purchasing became feasible for me, but I’ve never had real trouble upgrading several models component by component.
That’s actually quite interesting. All the mac people I know (including my ex-mac parents) just get new computers when their old macs go. We’ve only messed with Macs a little–mostly trying to get a bunch of files off my dad’s mac–and what we tried to do was a nightmare. We never did get the files off, so the mac sits, gathering dust, in my dad’s office, on the off chance he might need a file. (Has he needed a file from the mac in the past several years? Of course not. Would it be more sensible just to reproduce whatever file he *may* need, some year in the future? Probably.)
And that’s probably a lot of what it comes down to. All the geeks I know are PC geeks, so I learned to tear apart PCs, and had plenty of people to turn to for PC support. The only mac fanatic I know lives 5 1/2 hours away.
Our sibling department at work does some laptop repair, and I’ve put in memory and switched out a hard drive, but that’s the extent of what I want to do with a laptop. I’m willing to tear apart a desktop, but a laptop? Forget it. :) I’m not THAT much of a glutton for punishment!