Hiring the Internet

Everyone hates spam. (I do not speak of the canned meat product. And I will not judge you if you like it!) Even on the apparently limitless Internet, spam seems like a waste of space and time.

The blog, in particular, has been a target of these abuses. Imagine posting an entry and then you receive an alert in your email about a comment. You eagerly log back into your blog to view substantive comments, and all you see is “Come visit my site for the cheapest computer games!” It also mucks things up for blog readers who are following a thread of comments on an entry, and they have to scroll past the keyword-packed, completely irrelevant spam posts.

Google, of course, has been on top of this problem for some time now. The search engine cannot get rid of spam comments, but it can at least ignore them in regards to SEO. Whenever Google sees the attribute (rel=nofollow”) in a hyperlink, that link will receive not contribute to the ranking of the website in search engine results. This way, spam criminals will not reap any rewards from abusing blog comments, backtracks, or referrer lists. The actual HTML coding around the link changes, with a nofollow tag inserted.

A number of popular sites have instituted this measure, including WordPress, LiveJournal, Blogger, Flickr, and MSN Spaces. The attribute can be used in any area of the site where another user can insert a link (such as a referrer list), but the comments section is perused the most by readers.

In all honesty, the blogger will have little to do. The biggest step is to choose a site whose software uses the nofollow tag automatically. Take the time to review all the different sites available for blogging, see what they have to offer in terms of spam protection and SEO allowances, and then make your choice.

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