Link spammers hit Guardian
Craig McGinty’s discovered that link spammers are targeting the Guardian’s blogs: ‘Maybe I’m being paranoid,’ he asks. ‘But surely there are better ways to run adverts than off people’s names in comments?’
Maybe not. Google uses a complicated algorithm to give web pages a ranking out of ten. Some call this Google Juice. The more Google Juice a page has the higher it goes in Google search results.
Each link to a web page is treated as a vote for that page. Votes from pages that already enjoy a high score count for much more than votes from those that don’t. With a Google Page Rank of eight out of ten, the Guardian News Blog has a lot of Google Juice and so a link is well worth having.
Early link spammers were very crude. They’d put links like ‘buy Viagra here’ in the comment to any old blog. They were easily spotted and deleted (although with many blogs abandoned, deletion isn’t guaranteed). Guardian link spammers are far more subtle, with their genuine looking quick fire comments.
The answer is to do as Craig has done and insert a piece of code (‘rel=”nofollow”’) into links posted in comments. This tells Google, and other search engines, that the page linked to may be dodgy.
It must be disappointing, even to a seasoned hack like Roy Greenslade, to discover that those who seem so quick to value your opinions are only after Google Juice.
Contact Stephen Newton
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