Trackback spam the next major problem?
Filed under: cyberspace
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Tagged with: Lately it seems us bloggers have been getting a fair deal of shiny armor plating against comment spam. Of course we have Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist, the one that sort of started the anti-spam countermeasures for blogs in general. WordPress has quite sophisticated anti spam modules and for Pivot we have my own Pivot-Blacklist which is maturing quite nicely as well. But then there came the nofollow attribute. An initiative in order to stop blog spam falsely inflating pagerank at Google. It seems like an almost altruistic act but of course for Google itself it's even more important than for us bloggers. Lots of spam-inflated pageranks makes the whole pagerank thing less valuable which is why Google just had to do something. "Now what?", will the spammers probably wonder. The answer is, I'm afraid, trackback spam.
Trackback links are VERY relevant links. They tie our 'blogosphere' together. Adding a 'nofollow' attribute to these links would in my opinion seriously devaluate trackback. It would loosen the interrelations between articles on our blogs. I really wouldn't want to add a nofollow attribute to interesting trackback links personally and I assume many bloggers will agree. So we might have a new possible target for spammers: the trackbacks. On my blogs the amount of trackback spams is increasing rapidly which is exactly why I added anti-trackbackspam capabilities to Pivot Blacklist.
The spam problem remains. We can choose to let the spammers bring us to our knees by either disabling trackback or by adding nofollow attributes to those links as well but that would really be a shame. It would mean the spammers brought us to our knees. Let's not let that happen!
I think Google could do something far, far more effective about spammers inflating pageranks by spamming our blogs which is appointing a small team that simply bans spammer domains completely. A list of domains is readily available on Jay Allen's site so Google: what are you guys waiting for?
The spam problem remains. We can choose to let the spammers bring us to our knees by either disabling trackback or by adding nofollow attributes to those links as well but that would really be a shame. It would mean the spammers brought us to our knees. Let's not let that happen!
I think Google could do something far, far more effective about spammers inflating pageranks by spamming our blogs which is appointing a small team that simply bans spammer domains completely. A list of domains is readily available on Jay Allen's site so Google: what are you guys waiting for?
At 07 February '06 - 13:36 yesistme wrote:
At 08 February '06 - 04:09 Mike Glaser wrote: