Web Development Insight

One of the banes of blogging is spam comments. Nearly every blogger gets them. One way to reduce comment spam is to turn off accepting comments on older posts. Each blog host will have a different way to do this…if it is possible. Check with your host to see how.

Generally trackbacks are a nuisance since they do not require a login to implement. The poor moderator or comment filter must decide whether these are legitimate or not.

Since shutting off accepting comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks before a specific date is not built-in, WordPress has a comment timeout plug-in that does the job.

Doug

In order to mitigate comment spam, the “rel=nofollow” link attribute has gained much notoriety. The idea behind it is simple: any link that is not trusted will have the attribute “rel=nofollow” added to it. The search engines will see this and ignore the link. One obvious problem with this is that good links are also ignored (i.e. the link target does not get “credit” for a site linking to them).

Here are examples of nofollow links.

Before:

<a href="http://www.mysite.com">Follow Me</a>

After:

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mysite.com">Follow Me</a>

nofollow may appear with other words in the rel attribute:

<a rel="nofollow homerun" href="http://www.mysite.com">Follow Me</a>

Check with your blog host to see if nofollow is enabled. WordPress, for one, has it on and the only way to get it off is to install a plugin and turn it off.

If Google sees a nofollow in a link it will:

• not follow it
• not count it as a vote toward increasing PageRank
• not count the link text in determining the web page’s relativity

Note that Google does not assume the nofollow link is bad; it just ignores it. In other words, the link will not be used against you.

Nofollow is not only for blog comments; it can be used anywhere a link can. If you use links that you think may not be up to par, then it does not hurt to add the nofollow attribute.

If your blog is moderated or you get little or no spam then it is ok to turn off ‘nofollow’. Though not an answer to blog comment spam, at least it is part of an answer.

Doug