Google, the ever innovative search engine on the internet has joined the fight against us bloggers number 1 frustration: people spamming our comment forms and / or referrer lists. The solution is simple but highy effective at the same time. As we all know, the main reason for spammers to pollute blogs, guestbooks, wiki's and other public spaces on the net is to improve their PageRank on Google.

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The more links there are to a specific site, the more relevant Google thinks the site is. Of course this mechanism becomes a lot less effective if people take advantage of it. Therefore Google has decided to take proper action. This doesn't only help us bloggers but of course it helps themselves as well by creating more accurate PageRank scores.

The only thing creators of software really have to do is make sure that all links added by visitors get an extra rel attribute with nofollow as it's content. If GoogleBot finds a link with this attribute set it will not follow the link and therefore not inflate the PageRank for the linked site.

An example:

<a href="http://www.i-marco.nl/weblog/">visit i-marco.nl</a>

is a normal link to this site. If it appears on a site it will help me get a higher pagerank. Now let's look at the spam protected version. It will look like this:

<a href="http://www.i-marco.nl/weblog/" rel="nofollow">visit i-marco.nl</a>

It's as easy as that. Now let's hope spammers quickly find out about this. Spamming weblogs to improve PageRank has now become utterly useless. Pivot, the blogging software powering this site, has built in support for this as from version 1.22 which was released yesterday. Let's hope this approach becomes succesful, hopefully in the future making my Pivot-Blacklist a tool that's no longer necessary.

You can read some more on this subject in Khevor wrote: