I’ve implemented a refinement to rel=”nofollow” that strikes a balance between denying any benefit to spammers, and penalizing legitimate comment posters.
If you post a comment to this site, and include an author URL, or any URLs in your comment body, they will have rel=”nofollow” slapped on them. But, after 10 days, rel=”nofollow” will come off and Google (or whoever) will follow your links and calculate rank appropriately. For the first 10 days, your comment is in a sort of probation.
The theory here is that I maintain this site fairly well, and although some comment spam does make it through the filters and appear on the site, I always delete it. I usually delete it the same day, so 10 days gives me plenty of time to take care of it before the spammer would begin to see any benefit.
The obvious next refinement would be a dead man’s switch, so that if for some reason I’m unable to come around and prune back the spam for more than 10 days, the rel=”nofollow” is applied universally as a fail-safe.
Mark J
Sounds good. So URIs in the comment body also get the treatment? test
I think that once this new approach has gained traction and has existed for a while, comment spam will lessen, as they start to see that it is ineffective.
steve
Yup, that’s the idea. 10 days from now, rel=”nofollow” will be removed from both of those links.
Gavin
Another next refinement would seem to be a sort of white-listing.
If you’ve vetted one entry from a poster to default their subsequent entries to go straight through without the nofollow from day one.
steve
Yup, and a “this comment is OK” button that only I can push that skips the 10 days for a first time, legit poster. But a white-list would be tricky because if spammers knew that’s how things worked they could spoof it. I guess there could be a cookie or something.
But I don’t think it’s that bad to make people wait 10 days for their pagerank.
Collin
That’s an excellent idea. I’d use a plugin for that in an instant.
So do you have a download for us? :-)
steve
I’m still waiting to see what the “official” nofollow implementation is going to look like.
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