Comment Spam (nofollow)

Well, even though dieInter.net hasn't been very active in the past few months, I am still keeping an eye here, and maintaining the site, until the Facebook craze has dispersed a little.

What I noticed recently, is a lot of very smart little spam comments appearing on my site. Here's what they do nowadays..
Instead of just leaving a comment, saying "visit so-and-so site right now to increase your chances of getting lucky....etc etc"

They (the spammers) now has a very unique new technique of leaving comments which is vaguely tied to the topic. It really doesn't look like blatant spam right away... you have to read it twice to notice that this spammer left this comment, but what he is actually doing is just linking to his own website.

You see, it works like this: if Google sees a lot of big and well-known sites linking to your site, inevitably your site must be good/valuable in the eyes of those of the maintainers of those sites. Therefore Google increases your "pagerank".

Think for instance... if CNN.com's homepage had a link directly to dieInter.net in large bold letters... Google already knows CNN.com being a valuable site with good and valid content, and CNN is a highly rated site. So if CNN links to dieInter.net, that means they like dieInter.net, and this website's "pagerank" would improve.

On the other hand... If CNN wants to mention my website, but they don't want to be connected or affiliated with me at all, they can always put a small piece of code right next to the link. This is called the rel="nofollow attribute.

This tells Google not to follow the link from CNN to my website.
...and that's exactly what I have done now... I have added the nofollow tag to all new, and existing comments. Maybe this will discourage the spammers a little...

It essentially means they are spamming, but there would be no potential gain for them. What's the point....