the corner office

Google has unveiled a new scheme intended to discourage comment spammers. All you do is insert a rel="nofollow" attribute to all visitor-provided links on your site, and Google will ignore the link in determining page rankings. The idea is that spammers will stop bombarding sites if they don't gain search engine prominence by doing so.

I'm curious to see what comes of it. How ubiquitous will this solution have to be, before spammers go "ok, you got us" and move on? I'm sceptical.

There must be like eleventy billion blogs out there, and even if the majority of blogs implement the nofollow changes, it will take a long time to reach the critical point where spammers don't gain any benefit from comment spam. If ever. Most attentive bloggers delete comment spam diligently, but the comments keep coming back. Spammers' bots will continue bombarding sites in the hope of scoring a hit or two. In a clamped-down atmosphere, the value of each page-ranked "hit" will increase. Will it encourage comment spammers to be even more aggressive?

What's more, even if their pagerank isn't improved, the plain visibility of their spam messages has value, much like spam email. Again, simple visibility becomes more valuable if page ranking becomes less valuable.

So the way I see it, it isn't a panacea. Every bit helps though, I guess.

I can also imagine there will be interesting social implications. All of a sudden you can categorise links - links "worthy" of Google page ranking, and links which aren't. How would you react if someone links to your site/blog but inserts a "nofollow" attribute? Would you feel snubbed? What message are you sending if you do that? Richard Schwartz has more thoughts on this, including what will probably become one of the most common nofollow uses: sending small "fsck you"s to the upper echelons of blogdom :-)