I have started mirroring this site here.
That has two purposes.
The original idea was that I like what I saw at the Wordpress test drive site provided by opensourcecms.com. I want a Wordpress blog.
On the other hand, I don't want to deal with the problem of shutting down my existing site and trying to import everything into the new one.
Instead I plan to post the same content to both sites.
The second purpose is to enable comments again, which I have taken down on the main site in May 2004.
To do this, I keep the shadow site out of the Google index by using this "robots.txt" file:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /wordpress/ # I want to keep comment spammers away
That should keep the pagerank of the shadow site at zero. That in turn might keep comment spam out, so I will try and see what happens if I leave comments open there.
The concept of denying comment spammers a Google rank boost is not new. See for example this May 2004 post by Simon Willison.
However, keeping the whole blog site out of the Google index seems to be something not yet tried elsewhere. It might prove more effective. The spam robots won't start looking for comment forms in the first place on a pagerank zero blog. The usual solutions require that the spammer robot understands that the comment from the high pagerank site will not result in any pagerank gain. This solution requires that he stays away from a pagerank zero blog, which is more likely than that the spammer robot has any intelligence built in.
I don't know if this will work, but it is worth trying.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at January 18, 2005 11:21 PM | TrackBack