by Head of Search
Andrew Girdwood
On Wednesday, following close on the heels of a leak of the news, the search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN search announced their support for a new use of an attribute in anchor tags. The goal is to reduce search engine spam. Andrew Girdwood
The "nofollow" value for the relationship attribute ("rel") will not be interpreted by Googlebot, Yahoo! Slurp and MSNBot as an instruction to ignore the link.
Support for the terminology has been introduced to curb the growing trend in comment spam. Comment spam is the addition of unwelcome comments in blogs, guestbooks, reviews or other user inserted comments designed purely to boost the number of links to a target web site.
Google said, "If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it."
Yahoo described the new instruction as a defence against comment spam. Blog guru and Yahoo search team member, Jeremy Zawodny, wrote; "We think this is a good first step toward significantly reducing the spam burden on bloggers and weblog hosting companies. It's great to see so many players on board. In the coming weeks you can expect to see the changes reflected in our web index."
Microsoft will be introducing the attribute to their new MSNSpaces service. Ken Moss the General Manager of MSN Search (search development and search test) wrote; "Fighting this web spam is one of the harder parts of our job. Spammers are very creative people who evolve their techniques over time. Over the past year, being the newbie to the search engine block, we have had to discover and combat all of the techniques that have been developed over the past 5 years. Now, finally, we get to move forward!"
The search engines are not the only sites to co-announce the news. Significant blogging portal Six Apart/LiveJournal said they had been working against spam for some time. On LiveJournal the nofollow attribute will be introduced on comments from non-friends.
