December 8, 2009 at 10:01 PM
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Ben
The latest check-in of BE.NET (1.5.1.36) has a small, but important change. The three themes included with BE.NET now include rel=”nofollow” on the links of commenter’s websites.
This is a theme specific change. So if you’re using a custom theme, and even if you upgrade to the latest build of BE.NET, there’s a good chance you might not have the NOFOLLOW instruction on these links. It can simply be added in the CommentView.ascx file in your theme’s blog folder.
As I’m using a custom theme myself, I just added NOFOLLOW to this blog too. Wikipedia has a good writeup on NOFOLLOW, in case you aren’t familiar with its purpose. I’m a little surprised it’s taken this long to get NOFOLLOW into the themes that are included with BE.NET. Better late than never!
I get a lot of comment spam on this blog. As I’m moderating comments, it ends up never showing up since I don’t approve any of it (TIP to spammers, stop wasting your time!).
Comment spammers are a lot more likely to leave comments on blogs that do not include NOFOLLOW. Yes, I’m sure a lot of the spammers actually look at these types of details when scoping out blogs to attack.
Incidentally, the ResolveLinks extension that comes with BE.NET already includes the NOFOLLOW instructions. This is the extension that will convert URLs in comments into hyperlinks. If the extension finds a URL like www.google.com in the comment content, it will convert that into:
<a href="http://www.google.com" rel="nofollow">www.google.com</a>
This conversion is done as the comment is being served.
I’m anxious to see what type of impact adding NOFOLLOW will have on my level of comment spam.
Fingers crossed ...