YAY!
Chris O’Donnell found a plugin for MT that prevents Google and other search engines from scanning comments. This means that comment spam won’t work anymore. The spammers can still post comments, but it will do them no good as their page ranks will not move up.
The plug-in is backwards compatible to at least MT v 2.64. If you are running an MT-based blog, you can download the plugin here. Chris, via email, points out that for 2.6x blogs, you only need to upload the plugin file to your plugins directory; the PHP file is only used in v 3.x. The install takes all of five minutes.
BTW, I’ve now gone over a week without a single comment spam. I’m sure vervehosting is much happier with me.
5 Responses to “YAY!”
 Comment by Tim Haas January 19th, 2005 at 9:26 am |
I don’t think it stops the SE from scanning comments, just from using any links in the comments for ranking calculations. Stopping the engines from scanning comments entirely would cause a lot of great content to be lost to the ages. |
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Comment by Daryl Cobranchi January 19th, 2005 at 9:48 am |
Yeah- you’re right. I was sloppy. Thanks. |
 Comment by Andrea January 19th, 2005 at 11:34 am |
Well, there goes my page rank. I don’t spam you but I comment here often enough that it’s actually made a difference in my Google backlinks. Of course, that’s not why I comment here but it was a nice fringe benefit. |
 Comment by Joan January 20th, 2005 at 9:35 am |
Oh! I didn’t even know that the purpose of comment spam was to raise somebody’s Google rankings. I had thought those idiots really imagined that I would decide to visit their online casino in the middle of reading The Gutless Pacifist. |
 Comment by triticale January 20th, 2005 at 2:35 pm |
Arms versus armor. The history of warfare since the days of leather and wood. |