Latest posts for the topic "Antispam measure for Advanced Guestbook"

Antispam measure for Advanced Guestbook

lloyd_borrett — GMT

G'day there,

Some of you may be aware of the recent move by Google to combat spam links. This initiative is now also being supported by MSN Search and Yahoo! See [url]http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html[/url]

[quote]If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.[/quote]

While this antispam initiative is focused on blogs, it is also appropriate to support the initiative in guestbooks. Thus I decided to work out what changes would be needed for Advanced Guestbook 2.3.1 to support this initiative.

To add the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks in Advanced Guestbook, you just have to make a simple change to your templates/url.php file.

Change:
[code][/code]

To:
[code][/code]

If you have HTML Codes and/or AGCodes enabled, then there are probably other places changes would need to be made. But for security reasons, I don't enable those features and thus haven't bothered to work out the required changes.

Best Regards, Lloyd.

JTD — GMT

You can do that with a meta tag. Nothing new there.
[quote][color="green"][/color][/quote]

Carbonize — GMT

Useless to me as I already use the rel attribute as the target attribute is only supported in transitional doc types. As JTD says the robots metatag can achieve exactly the same. This move by Google is pointless. Yes one reason for spam is to increase search engine positioning but it is mainly publicity, the more links to your site the more likely people are to click it.

D.A. — GMT

I think you all are wrong. The robots metatag does not achieve exactly the same thing. The robots.txt "noindex, nofollow" is to keep your guestbook from being indexed by the search engines. The (rel="nofollow") is for guestbooks that you want indexed but you do not want the hyperlinks appearing in the guestbook to get credit. See the difference?

Carbonize — GMT

If spiders are told not to visit your guestbook then how are they going to follow the links within?

D.A. — GMT

Can you read?

The (rel="nofollow") is for guestbooks that you [b]want[/b] indexed

If you want them indexed, you would not put the noindex,nofollow in the robots.txt file. You would do as Lloyd Borrett suggested and make a simple change to your templates/url.php file.

So, there are two choices:

Do not allow spiders = robots.txt file meta tag

or

Allow spiders, but disallow the following of hyperlinks = edit templates/url.php

Carbonize — GMT

And I repeat [b]THIS WILL NOT STOP SPAM[/b]. It's a nice idea but it's also the search engines trying to boost their own ego's by claiming that people only spam guestbooks and blogs to boost their ratings.