Hi Guys, I have a area on my site that is very popular so i dont want to remove it but it keeps getting spammed. The area allows people to post comments/links onto a page. How can i tell yahoo/msn/google to ignore the links ? I remembering reading something about 'nofollow' command? also something about being able to block them using .htaccess file or robots.txt file? suggestions ? whats the best way. will it stop all spiders following the links ? Thanks in advance.
If it's spammed by humans, you can use the attribute "nofollow" (and 'advertise' about it, cause if they don't know, it's kind of pointless.) If the spam come from bot you can try a capcha (I'm not sure about the english word, I mean a "verification form".)
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html But it will not protect you from spam. The nofollow attribute will just prevent trust (pagerank and/or keyword/anchor weight and/or indexing power) from beeing passon on to that particular URL.
Try using a registration form before they can post post comments/links. This won't eliminate spam but will eliminate atleast a few.
If you allow people to post links to your site then the only thing you will get posted will be spam. I suggest blocking any posts with html in them.
Hmmm. I take it you are using Apache... You can try and get a simple script in place that would parse the posts and remove all the URLs from them automatically, or convert them to plain text, or replace slashes with underscores, or whatever. The rel=nofollow thing wouldn't prevent spiders from crawling, but it will result in no PR and link pop being transferred. Warkot
If you want geniune comments to continue, then like mad4 said, if you disallow html, that will remove the incentive for spammers. If you don't any comments spam or not, then your system may allow you to disable comments entirely for that section. If the spam you're getting is automated, then it may be worth implementing a CAPTCHA (type what you see).