Google have announced a new tag that should remove the motive for content spamming.
From now on, when Google MSN, and Yahoo! see the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, they will now no longer index any such links.
Keith McDuffee - the author of the very excellent AuthImage - a Captcha comment spam blocking WordPress plugin has published code to implement the new nofollow tag in WordPress.
Be aware that there is a typo in the published code - I have commented on Keith’s site to make him aware of this but just in case you miss that, remove the space in the first line before the ?PHP if one exists - if there is no space there, Keith has probably fixed it.
This nofollow tag won’t be a quick solution to this problem, as it won’t be implemented in all blogs for quite some time, so the incentive to spam will still exist. Spammers are not going to go the trouble of trying to see which blogs have implemented this, so don’t expect a dramatic fall off in the amount of spam in the next couple of days or even weeks!
Hey If you study my logs, I’ve been getting random requests from Googlebot, It’s always in the root or in relevant subdirectories (usually /blog and forum or similar). All of these sites are with Word Press, and I can promise there is no mention of or links or anywhere. This means Googlebot is guessing that these files will be there. Now I’ve come to expect random flailing for syndication files from Feedster and Kinja, but Google? Et tu, Googlebot? Google pr updation is neer by in this month, so get your way……..