Nofollow and the Spam War Arms Race

Recent events have caused me to rethink the use of the nofollow attribute on my blog comment links. Much has already been written about whether or not to use the nofollow attribute, so I won’t re-hash those arguments here. Personally, I had come down on the side of believing that nofollow did little to stop spam. Besides, commenters add value to my sites and it’s appropriate to reward them with a link. So I’ve been running one of the DoFollow plugins for WordPress to override the default nofollow behavior.

Then the spam flood came that most of us have seen by now. These spam comments are harder to detect because they seem to be written by a human and customized to somewhat fit the post content. Continue reading Nofollow and the Spam War Arms Race