24-hour Nofollow: An Experiment
If you've commented on this blog recently, you may have noticed that your comment was nofollowed. Don't panic. In light of recent spam attacks, I'm running a proof-of-concept experiment and am automatically nofollowing new comments for 24 hours, after which they will be followed normally.I very much support link following, and will do my best to support my active visitors and commenters by allowing you to link to your own sites. As a usability specialist, I'm strongly opposed to punishing my users for the sins of a few opportunistic morons. My hope is that the 24-hour nofollow will give me enough time to screen and remove spam without hurting my legitimate visitors.
I have begun to see spam as a serious threat to usability, and my next three posts will focus on this topic. Among them, I'll be going out on a limb and releasing the techniques and source code I've used to fight spam on this blog. Over the next three Tuesdays, I hope you'll return for the following posts: "Anatomy of A Blog Spammer", "Spam Fighting Secrets Revealed", and "CAPTCHA: Is There A Better Way?".
Dr. Pete
· Friday, June 13@James: It's pretty amazing that they dropped so quickly. Links are huge for blog spammers (something I'll be talking about in my next post), so I think nofollow can have a huge impact, but I figured it would take a while. At this point, my filters are working really well, so it's honestly been hard for me to gauge the effectiveness of the 24-hour rule. It's more of a proof-of-concept experiment.
Mike Maddaloni - The Hot Iron
· Friday, June 13@Dr. Pete - No worries on the links, I'm always up for an experiment, especially if i find out the results.
@James - Can you elaborate more on these rules you implemented?
mp/m
James
· Saturday, June 14Mike,
I use Wordpress for our blog and WP automatically nofollows everything in comments - author, links within the comment, etc. (You probably already knew that...lol)
I wanted to change everything to dofollow but I didn't want a bunch of spam...and I came across this plugin.
Apparently it was on sphinn a while ago...but you can find all the rules you can set in that blog post. :)
Best,
James
James
· Friday, June 13Dr. Pete - We nofollowed comments for a while...and the spam was up to 60+ spam comments every single day. Earlier this week, probably on Tuesday or Wednesday, we opened our blog to dofollow links with 'rules' tied to them and immediately, the spammy comments dropped to roughly 6 to 10 a day so far this week - the change was immediate! I'm not sure why the dofollow change had an adverse affect on spam but I'm lovin it. :) Thoughts? -James