Google has a few weapons in store against people trying to alter its search result rankings with Weblogs – the search kings plan to unwrap their own technology to block these so-called link spammers, a new tag that blocks their little tricks.
"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,'" Google said in a posting on the company's own Weblog.
"This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it," the posting continued. "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."
Ten top blog software makers have joined Google in the tag block effort: LiveJournal, Scripting News, Six Apart, Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, Buzznet, blojsom, Blosxom, and MSN Spaces.
Google said the new tag gives automatic "nofollow" attributes to links that users can create visiting blogs and discussion forums and other feedback-friendly Websites.
"The tag provides you a way to flag links that are basically not yours," search engine expert Danny Sullivan told CNET News. "The reason why that's helpful is because they won't count those links. It makes the idea of comment spamming less attractive." He added that this indexing tag block would be the first genuine innovation for Internet publishers in almost ten years, the last being a tag to duck indexing by search engines entirely.
"It's nice to see the search engines give Web authors a new tool to control how we're indexed," he told CNET.
Six Apart said they would adopt the Google tag standard at once. The operator of professional and individual blogging said people publishing using SixApart's Typepad program would get tags on their blogs automatically delineating between what they publish and what third parties put into comment forms.
