How to stop comment spam from Google - Implement into Drupal?

By mastahl on 19 Jan 2005 at 16:11 UTC

http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

Preventing comment spam
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. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

Comments

Sorry

mastahl commented 19 January 2005 at 16:13

Just realized that there was a similar more detailed post.
http://drupal.org/node/11129

there's actually a patch already...

walkah commented 19 January 2005 at 16:22

http://drupal.org/node/15847 . just waiting for Dries to commit.

While I don't think this is necessarily a spam "solution", it may deter some comment spammers - as their PageRank will be unaffected. We can only hope.

--
James Walker :: http://walkah.net/

Could this patch adversely affect other types of searching?

grohk commented 19 January 2005 at 20:32

For instance, if drupal.org decides to implement this option would not searching for topics and issues via google be affected adversely? Seems like this would be nice for anonymous comments, but trusted users links, which might be useful, are going to be thrown in the same grouping and excluded from the search engines. Is this a valid concern?

for comments only

Pxtl commented 20 January 2005 at 05:36

Most sites have good management that keep crapflooding off of the main pages. I think implementing this anti-pagerank feature for comments only would be perfect.

That isn't my point

grohk commented 20 January 2005 at 10:35

my point is that enabling anti-pagerank for all comment links, even for authenticated users, sounds like a bad idea. It is a bit of the old throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I think it is a great idea and could be workable, but it needs more discreet control, just as the spam filter has a bypass permission for certain user roles.

Interesting article on the

grohk commented 21 January 2005 at 11:06

Interesting article on the problems associated with this idea:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/1/19/35627/2443

---
Code0range: Drink Your Juice

For drupal install without the patch

arnabdotorg commented 19 January 2005 at 18:30

Those who don't want to / can't apply walkah's patch can download the same thing as a module from:

http://arnab.drupaldevs.org/tmp/nofollow.module

To install, save the above link's content as nofollow.module, and upload it to where all the other modules are. Then enable this module in admin, and go to input formats / HTML Filter / Configure , and enable "NoFollow". All links should now be appended with the nofollow rel tag.

_{personally, I think adding useless meta information is bad. this module exists only to play 'catch up' :)}