[wp-hackers] Support for "nofollow"

[inforequest]

Stephen Minutillo steveminutillo-at-gmail.com |wordpress hackers list 
092004| wrote:

>see nofollow only as a fail-safe.  You have all these spam prevention
>measures, whatever they are, maybe keyword scanning, bayesian
>analysis, a whitelist if that's what you like, registered commenters,
>looking for suspiciously encoded characters, too many links, too many
>comments in a short period of time, etc. etc.  But still, some comment
>spam is going to get through.  rel="nofollow" on brand new comments is
>going to make sure that when spammers do figure out how to get around
>your countermeasures (and they will, eventually), they STILL get no
>benefit.
>
>It seems that WP 1.5 has some new, very effective spam countermeasures
>already.  It's going to take spammers a while to figure them out and
>rewrite their tools to get around them.  If it's very well known that
>1.5 also makes use of nofollow, there's a chance that the spammers
>won't even bother retooling to attack it, and move on to some other
>target.  At least, that's my naive hope.
>
>
>Steve
>_______________________________________________
>  
>
Well, the thinking in some spammer camps is that this is an admission by 
the major search engines (SEs) that a link is a link; and evidence that 
SEs consider a comment spam link meaningful enough to deserve this kind 
of action. That has not been the official message before. The prior 
message has been that guestbook and comment backlinks are somehow 
filtered or devalued when compared to genuine in-context backlinks. 
Effective if super-high volume, but not generally worth any long term 
investment.

With this new announcement  we should see alot MORE comment spam now, 
because there is virtual certainty that they have value. Believe it or 
not, alot of spammers did not bother with the automated blog comment 
spambots because they had better ways to get higher quality backlinks 
(think wiki spam, link buying, reciprocal trades, referrer bombing).

The comfortting note is that spamers will continue to target mainly 
UNMANAGED blogs. They are likely to look for footprints to older 
versions of the blog software, so it would be wise for WP to make sure 
the new version has a different footprint than the old version. Get a 
reputation for using rel=nofollow in WP (believe it or not you have that 
already :-), and make sure WP1.5+ has a different footprint than 1.2 in 
the comments areas. Also, the captcha methods and the 
varying-form-field-names-and-layout methods should work well as a foil 
to most bots.

If you moderate comments or allow them with rel="nofollow" or use any 
other post-post management technique, you may quite simply have to 
delete alot more spam now than you did before.

 -=john andrews
coming soon to www.seo-fun.com


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