Just back from dinner at 8:30PM on Tuesday, and I guess it's fair to say that the announcement has been made, except there is nothing on Google's weblog yet.

Here's the story. On Friday, when I was in DC, I got an email from Matt Cutts at Google asking if I wanted to help them work out a way to clue Google's crawler in on what is and isn't comment spam. I immediately said yes, having worked on this stuff in a variety of contexts, and coming to the conclusion that only Google was in a position to really do something about comment and referer spam.

Over the following days I implemented support for the protocol in Manila, which is the blogging tool from UserLand that I use on my servers, including this one. I am also making the code available to all Manila users and UserLand (see below).

Anyway, this is good news. I was happy to do this work, and happy to support Google, and happy to see that the other search engines are getting behind it, and happy to see the blogging tool vendors getting on board. It's one of those moments that's purely good. Thanks everyone.

Now, I'll accumulate pointers here, as articles and announcements come online.

eWeek article on the anti-comment-spam initiative.

Announcements of support: Six Apart, MSN, Yahoo.

Quote from last year

11/24/04: "Remember, the reason these guys spam us is to steal page rank from Google, by making it appear as if we're pointing to them."

Manila code

Manila code for implementing rel="nofollow".

To see how it works, do a View Source on these pages...

1. This page.

2. The comments for this post.

3. The trackbacks.

4. The referers page for this site.

What about naked links in comments?

Ahh, you got me there. The CMS under Manila automatically hots-up those links and they don't contain the magic attribute. Still have some more work to do here.

Will UserLand release the code?

That's up to UserLand. I'm happy to let them do anything they want to do with it, just don't take my name off it, not that they would do that.

Will this get rid of comment spam?

Maybe. But it surely will elimate at least some of the profit from comment spam.

Does that make me feel good?

Yes, in fact it does.

# Posted by Dave Winer on 1/15/05; 2:56:25 PM - --