Nice Try
Apparently TSFR is now getting enough traffic so that some of the more marginal links-spammers are taking note of it. Last night, some Indian sweatshop worker waded through and carefully commented a string of posts with link spam, which managed to survive a whopping 10 hours before I went in and deleted it.
Now, I don't work for Google, so I don't know their magical link rating algorithm, but even assuming that Google does stupid link-gathering (in that once a link is entered into their database, it will never go away) it seems like it would be a dumb idea to hope that your linkspam will get spidered before someone comes along and either deletes it or modifies all the links to point at the Saudi Arabian ministry of proper conduct.
Ah, well, at least this will give me an opportunity to finish setting up some of the antispam filter code I've been meaning to put in.
Comments
Oh, your comments are showing up all right, otherwise I wouldn't be replying to them.
The google nofollow is <META NAME="Googlebot" CONTENT="nofollow">; I've tweaked my individual page (which is where you see the comments, ho ho!) theme to include it.
The grand scheme is to add a @USERDIR@/filter/comment.d directory, where I can drop in text filters that the comment code passes incoming comments through before letting the comments out. Of course I'll need to fix the comment storage so it doesn't just dump them into One Big File, but that's a repair job for a different day.
Actually, I was referring to the way those other blog software programs put "rel='external nofollow'" in the href tag of any url in the comments. That prevents the search engines from following the link.
Google claims that the meta tag does the same thing, and it has one big advantage over tagging each link; I don't have to parse the comment for <a's and strip out anything that might overrride the rel="nofollow" modifier, then stuff in the rel="nofollow" by myself.
Of course the feature with the meta tag is that it might only work with google. Some people say that tagging a page with <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> will do the trick for every robot, and, once again, that doesn't involve doing additional content parsing. It's certainly worth a try, because the spammers love the attention.
Comments are closed
I've never seen one of my comments appear on your blog, so I have no idea if you are following it or not, but there is a convention that blogs use to indicate to Google and the like that links are not to be indexed. You should have a look at a MovableType or Wordpress blog to see how they do it.
But the link spammers are more interested in the thousands of "fire and forget" blogs out there that are running old versions of software, and where the blog owners are either no longer maintaining their blogs or who actively don't care about blog spam, and so the links they post there live on for years. Next time you get a link spam, try googling for it and you'll find lots of these blogs that haven't had an entry in years, but which still accept comments.