(2005-01-17) Google No Follow Tag Spam

Google is going to finally help in the SpamWars via a No Follow tag attribute which blog software developers can use in their Comment forms to reduce the Page Rank benefit of Comment Spam. See 2004-02-08-CommentSpamIdea for similar idea. Here's Google's official announcement plus some comments from Dave Winer.

How might you apply this to Wiki Spam?

One idea:

• follow Zwiki model of distinguishing Appends from Edits

• allow anonymous users only to Append (you could still support authentication and give out accounts with Edit privileges to some number of people).

• wrap something around each Append comment's SmartAscii as its added

• when rendering a page, take any external links within such tags and add the No Follow attribute

Variant that doesn't even use No Follow tag:

• limit users to Append, and remove 'http://' from the SmartAscii itself. That way the link doesn't render.

  • probably have to separately handle 'href' tags in Appends - removing the 'http://' will leave an href that the browser will think is local to your server, so you'll still get a link, but it won't be valid.