John Batelle points to this article on spambots that defaced a website dedicated to the memory of a traffic accident victim. The deceased was the best friend of the author of that article, and the author is not pleased about this kind of behavior.
I was interested to read that "Google is known to have taken action to downgrade, or disregard links that it finds in guest books, because they are less trustworthy these days, than in the past, as a guide to relevancy".
That is because I speculated lately about the possibility of having Google downgrading links left by blog comment spam. While I was motivated by the possible deterring effect of such a policy on comment spam, there is another aspect. If someone is inflating their Google rating by comment spam, they are damaging the reliability of the rating system. Therefore, taking them out or setting their rank to 1 only restores what they should have gotten in the first place.
So if Google has some such policy in place for links found in guestbooks, maybe they would be willing to consider a similar policy for blog comment spam.
And one of the comments at Battelle's post points me to this Googleguy post: Apparently Google is already taking action against comment spammers.
If that is true, the most important job now is to educate potential comment spammers that their evil acts are not only extremely annoying to everyone else, but will only harm their Google rank. Please help to spread the word.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at March 5, 2004 09:22 PM | TrackBack