Philipp Lenssen has a great idea he is calling Fading Out Nofollows.  Most blog software handles the comment spam problem by adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to anchors in the comments section of your blog.  The idea here is that search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN will not follow these links during their spidering process and hence the spammer will not gain link juice from you.

The main drawback from this practice, is that it penalizes people who are posting legitimate comments on your blog.  Philipp’s idea is  a good one.  He suggests a middle  ground, where when a comment is first posted, it has the rel attribute by default.  Then after a specified period of time, the rel attribute is removed.  This gives the blogger some time to moderate the comments and delete the spam that happens to get through your filters (ie. Akismet).

In my opinion, I wonder how much the nofollow strategy is actually working.  I am getting more spam (over 1,000 comments/day) than ever.  About six months ago, I removed the rel=”nofollow” attribute altogether, and the amound of spam has remained consistant.

Both comments and pings are currently closed.