Re: Google's method to fight comment spam

It really does fly in the face of the whole pagerank ethic, obviously 
that has been dropped for a long time but as they say, where there is a 
way there is a will...

As long as this approach is adopted as a standard along similar lines 
such as target="_blank" it makes sense. This should be written up as a 
w3c issue until the new era of search infrastructure is more defined and 
broadly implemented.

Odd thing is, subvert advertising never really took off in bulletin 
boards as compared to weblogs. Maybe it's the raw volume but at the core 
is the same system of statement and response (minus a registration 
system of course).

For awhile this will limit the power of search as there is allot of 
valid information inside legitimate comments. There was some discussion 
over on LiveJournal 
http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_dev/669868.html about how it 
will handle implementing this. Essentially for 'friends' links work 
regular, for other registered users rel="nofollow" and anonymous users 
href is not rendered unless user specifies otherwise.

-cwolf

> Interesting development from Google - especially since one of their
> main features in the early days compared to other search engines was
> that they took into account those cross-references (from web pages
> in general) to improve the ranking. Victims of their own success ? :)
> 
> Mike.