Things in the web community have been getting rather exciting over the past few weeks. People are coming up with new ideas and leaps are being made forward in the areas of usability and accessibility.
The first thing that is extremely exciting is the old tool XMLHttpRequest. Google is (at the time of this writing) playing with it in there labs and have implemented it rather well. Others have also been playing with it using their install of Moveable Type whereas others have already begun using it in their web apps.
For those of you that have no idea what XMLHttpRequest is - it’s a way web developers can develop sites more like desktop software. It allows us to run things in the background and let a web surfer do things on our site without forcing them to refresh the page. Things are instant.
The other exciting thing that is happening is the fight against “Comment Spam”. A few days ago a report was written by Six Apart, the group that brought us Moveable Type. In this report, it walks us through quite a bit of information along with tactics to take in order to avoid SPAM.
Then, just yesterday, Google announced on their blog the strategy of not searching/indexing links that have the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks.
Quote from Google Blog From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
The idea has been taken so well by the community that thousands of people from large companies to individuals have already implemented this tactic. Yahoo and MSN have also pledged to not follow sites with this attribute in it as well.
As stated however - this doesn’t stop sites from being spammed but it does stop the reason why SPAMMERS are trying to put their information on our sites.
theParagon.ORG network has already taken huge strides in avoiding comment spam and in the next couple days a few rather large leaps will be taken to almost completely stop it on all sites hosted on theParagon network. I will be rolling out fixes to other friends and family these fixes once they have been completed on my end.
So these are just a few things that have already made 2005 very exciting. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
posted on January 22, 2005 | 10:18 AM EST
Add to the discussion.
Personally I’m very happy that they’ve done that. Now, not only does my new spam blocker help, but there’s just an extra layer of protection. It’ll be good to have my site back in my control :).
I was wondering, do you think that the new tag will lower page rank at all? I know that some of my old test pages for vaneerden.com got higher pagerank due to things like having the test url in mail lists (such as CSS-discuss list).
I was excited by the rel=”nofollow” idea at first, but after reading some other impressions:
(Eric Meyer) http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2005/01/21/more-spam-to-follow/
(Anne van Kesteren) http://annevankesteren.nl/archives/2005/01/nofollow
I think that prevention is still the best option. Also, it seems to punish legitimate links (like Bill says above). On blogs/forums/etc. that are monitored by real people, most spam will be blocked or quickly deleted. My approach (for now) is to keep my blockers up-to-date, and see how that works… but I haven’t had any real trouble with spam yet… see any wood to knock on?
Finally, some Swiss folks have the coolest use of XMLHttpRequest I’ve seen yet: http://map.search.ch/
In case I sounded too harsh before… ;-)
I do think rel=”nofollow” is good for most blogs, but if you can prevent spam on your own, I don’t see the need.
I may try to implement a waiting period on my blogs. Links get rel=”nofollow” for a day or two automatically, and it is removed if I haven’t deleted the comment in that time.
Cheers!
Yea - I’m still trying to figure out what exactly I want to do. I have pretty tight control on my Comment Spam and if a post does get through for some reason, it’s removed within minutes (often seconds).
That said - Google’s intention for the nofollow wasn’t to stop spam but to take away the value of putting it on a site. Spammers will continue posting it whereever - with or without the nofollow. But for those people that don’t have their sites cracked down on, allowing them to do a simple nofollow is great so it doesn’t ruin the web for everyone. It helps keep things cleaner.
Thinking: Maybe I should remove nofollow due to my current control on spam.
On another note:
http://map.search.ch/ is pretty cool and saw it before but it actually isn’t using XMLHttpRequest. That’s why I didn’t add it.
map.search.ch: I didn’t catch that update. Oh well.
nofollow: Good point, it should reduce the incentive. Let’s hope!
One other though on nofollow: Maybe only add it for non-registered users - or keep a list of “trusted” users. I don’t know how that would affect your sites though. It will be interesting to see what unique approaches (if any) the different blog packages do.
Congratulations on becoming a Dad, Aaron! You’re baby girl is beautiful and I’m sure you are having a lot of fun right now! God bless you bro! Later on,
-Brandon
That said - Google’s intention for the nofollow wasn’t to stop spam but to take away the value of putting it on a site. Spammers will continue posting it whereever - with or without the nofollow. But for those people that don’t have their sites cracked down on, allowing them to do a simple nofollow is great so it doesn’t ruin the web for everyone. It helps keep things cleaner.
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I too at first thought the nofollow was a good idea, but I have now changed my mind on that. I do-follow links now using a dofollow plugin for wordpress on my Aussie housewife blog. After a long time procrastinating I have seen the importance of dofollow and using the “do follow” principal to help keep the Internet better connected. http://www.reallyreally.net - Take a look at my dofollow blog and feel free to comment. Thank you, Regards Bree.
Paul Says:
Personally I’m very happy that they’ve done that. Now, not only does my new spam blocker help, but there’s just an extra layer of protection. It’ll be good to have my site back in my control :).