Search giants hook up to cut blog spam

[Dover]

Search giants hook up to cut blog spam
Yahoo and Google combat unsolicited blog comments

19 Jan 2005

Search giants Yahoo and Google have teamed up with a group of high profile internet firms to back a technique designed to help combat weblog comment spam.

Others involved include Google/Blogger, MSN Search, Six Apart (TypePad, MovableType, LiveJournal), and WordPress.

The scheme centres on modifying standard HTML 'href' link tags by adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to hyperlinks. This additional tag allows webmasters and weblog owners to tell search engines that the links are effectively untrusted...cont'd

http://www.vnunet.com/news/1160611

[motely36]

1. What a bizarre headline

I had to read it three times to figure out what it meant!

[Ian David]

2. If I understand correctly, this won't work

Email address harvesting 'bots can simply choose to ignore the no-follow tags.

On edit:
Never mind.

I mis-read the intent.

They're combatting "googlebombs."

Well, so much for spreading Santorum?
http://www.spreadingsantorum.com/index2.html

http://news.google.com/news?q=%22google+bomb%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&tab=wn&ie=UTF-8&scoring=d

What's a Google Bomb?

Google Bombs were conceived last April as part of a brilliant gag by Adam Mathes. In his own words:

Google is unique among search engines in that while it almost always shows you pages that have the exact keywords you are looking for, occasionally it will show you pages that don't have those keywords, but other pages linked to that page with those words.
http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/googlebombs.htm


The war on the web

Anthony Cox describes how his spoof error page turned into a 'Google bomb' for weapons of mass destruction

Thursday July 10, 2003
The Guardian

I had always wondered how those viral emails or amusing web page addresses forwarded to me built up such momentum. Little did I know that I would be responsible for one of the most successful internet memes this year, and be accused of developing a so-called "Google bomb" of mass destruction.

In early February, I was reading online a Guardian article about Hans Blix's problems obtaining cooperation in Iraq. Immediately after, I was confronted with the ubiquitous 404 error page, which usually tells the reader that a website is unavailable. With this serendipitous inspiration in mind, along with a text editor and some fiddling in a graphics package, I created a spoof 404 "weapons of mass destruction" error page. Saddam would have been proud; the page was deployed and operational well within 45 minutes.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,994676,00.html