Gotta stop the backlink spam

[Cygnus]

There are a few very, very strong marketers out there that do nothing but blog / forum / guestbook spamming...I have seen it work on multiple occassions and have been tempted to use their methods [just a simple software product] (so far, I have resisted).

Now...the 'nofollow' is certainly a move in the right direction for the search engines to get rid of this crap, but a lot of it will continue to exist. There needs to be a concerted effort among searchers to point out where the problems exist on spammed backlinks via quality reports. Otherwise, our industry might start to move in the wrong direction, away from quality links and content.

Sorry for the rant, but today I saw that my competitor had launched another dozen sites and is currently ranking for some rather difficult phrases, using the blog spam approach.

Cygnus

[jlknauff]

It may hold it's effect for a while-but once the current blogs update to the newer versions it will dies as quickly as KW stuffing.

Check this out, it's a little old but I'm pretty sure a lot of people haven't seen it yet...
preventing comment spam (http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html)

[Cygnus]

This I realize...but I'm not certain that the majority of blogs/guestbooks that currently exist will update...my fear is that only new ones will appropriately incorporate the 'nofollow'.

My hope (which is slightly stronger than my fear) is that the search engines will figure out a way to counter the remaining content spam...but it may take several months.