Google, Yahoo & MSN Fight Blog Spam

With all the talk of "search wars" over the past year, you wouldn't expect to read a news story about the three major search engine competitors working together. But that is the case today. Google, Yahoo and MSN have joined forces to fight the comment spam that has become the plague of many bloggers.

What is comment spam? Think of it as an evolution of guestbook spam. Chances are you've seen it. Perhaps you've even been a victim of it. Luckily, the biggest names in the search engine and blog industries have caught onto it. Comment spam occurs when misguided webmasters, in an effort to raise their search engine rankings by increasing the number of backlinks pointing to their sites, begin posting random links to their sites as comments on other people's blog entries. Ironically, it would be a lot easier, less tedious and probably more effective for these spammers to just join a link exchange program and fully automate their link exchange efforts.

Google, Yahoo and MSN will now be incorporating a new attribute (rel="nofollow") that will tell their spiders to discredit links in blog comments so that spammers will get no benefit whatsoever.

Many of the leading providers of blog software have already agreed to participate, including LiveJournal, Blogger, and MSN Spaces.

The Google Blog answers some questions on the new "nofollow" attribute. Webmasters who have further questions are encouraged to email commentspam at google.com.