Yahoo - Google - MSN in a Fight Against Blog Spam

With all the talk of "search engine wars" the past few years, you probably would not expect to read a news story about the 3 major search engine competitors working together. But that is indeed the case today. Yahoo, Google and MSN have all joined forces to fight the common spam that has become the plague of many bloggers.

What is comment spam? Think of it as an evolution of guest book 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 back links 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 Live Journal, 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.