There is always a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about comment spam. During my research for resources to post on Blogging Pro I see many bloggers giving up and closing down because of comment spam. I also see a lot of bloggers shut down comments all together in frustration to the plague of spam. For WordPress at least, there are tools for combating comment and trackback spam that are effective. Unfortunately many bloggers don’t know how or where to find these tools.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch proposes an ignore tag that bloggers can place before their comment tag instructing search engines not to index below the tag. The idea is that without indexing comments, spammers would have no incentive to spam comments as it would have no effect on their SE ranking.

Blogging platform writers would have to write those codes into their applications and provide an opportunity to turn the ignore tag on or off. If you leave it up to individual blog owners to use the ignore tag, a good majority of bloggers will never apply the tag or even understand how to apply the tag. Obviously Google, Yahoo and all the other search engines and directories would have to buy into the idea.

Danny does points out that the ignore tag could get abused, and quality content could be prevented from being indexed. Many times comments to a particular blog entry are more relevant and informative then the entry itself. Danny also proposes an indexing summit involving all the major SE’s to take a look at comment spam.

The short term solution is for blogging platforms to include an effective spam control tool that is seamless and easily updated to incorporate techniques to fight the next new wave of spam.

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