Come across this on PC Pro News this morning, search engine unite to fight spam, Google, Yahoo & MSN have joined forces to "attempt" to fight spam.

The type of spam we are talking about is the type you find on most forums, blogs and guestbooks. The search engines as well as a few big blogger sites such as Blogger.com are showing a united front (there is always a first time) and will now recognise the following code in a link.

< a href="http://www.spammersite.com" rel="nofollow"> My Great Website < /a>

Note the rel="nofollow", this will tell the search bots to ignore the link without ignoring the rest of the links/content on the page. meaning no PR will be passed and the anchor text will not be parsed creating a link of no value. This has got to be good news for any forum/blog owners out there that has a spam problem and may help to stop some of the spamming but how much is a another question.

This has to be the first time I have seen the big search engines working together in this way and although this will not stop the majority of spam affecting their indexes, I beleive it is the start of something big as many others have predicted.

The other downside to this is another factor to look at when checking backlinks links (shouldn't be to bad).

Originally Posted by Jamesanderson

< a href="http://www.spammersite.com" rel="nofollow"> My Great Website < /a>

Linking to someone with nofollow is bad and it should be considered spam. Nice to start but lets see how effectively its implemented by The G.

Why would linking to a site in this fashion be considered spam?

I don't understand what you mean by this, surely by linking to a site in this fashion it is creating no chance of your site being penalised for maybe linking to a bad site already being penalised.

Don't get me wrong I wouldn't agree with sites that started using it as a standard linking practice especialy on exchanges but the whole purpose is to allow linking without reffering robots. This could be used in several ways, imagine you want to demonstrate to your users how your prices are cheaper than a competators, you can link straight to their pricing page without passing the search bots thus passing no relevance or PR.

If you run a forum where people are abusing links, you can discourage users from doing so by including a note "Robots do not follow links on this forum". When a user has made X amount of posts that offer value to the forum, the tag is automaticly removed from any posts made.

While this will not stop spam alone the actual story is in the fact that three of the biggest SE's have started to work together. Working together probably being the only way to truely stand a chance of combating spam.

I would still be interested to know why you consider it spam, may be I have over looked something.

Why would linking to a site in this fashion be considered spam?

I consider this as spam for the only reason that people are linking to you in return for a link and if you link with not allowing them to follow the bots its not ethical way of linking and anything thats not ethical is spam from my point of view.

I don't understand what you mean by this, surely by linking to a site in this fashion it is creating no chance of your site being penalised for maybe linking to a bad site already being penalised.

You can never be penalized for linking to a bad site. If that can be the case I will register at my competitors site and put a link to the worst site to get him banned.

Originally Posted by shabbirbhimani

I consider this as spam for the only reason that people are linking to you in return for a link and if you link with not allowing them to follow the bots its not ethical way of linking and anything thats not ethical is spam from my point of view.

You can never be penalized for linking to a bad site. If that can be the case I will register at my competitors site and put a link to the worst site to get him banned.

I have not been on the forum for a while, hence my late responce but I just had to correct you on your post because it could quite easily give the wrong impression to webmasters who simply did not know.

The purpose of the no follow command is not for link exchanges although it will be another aspect to check when conducting them. It is designed to allow forum and blog owners to try and disscourage spamming on their sites. It will also let a site link to a competitors to demonstrate their services or products are cheaper or something similar but without adding to their link popularity.

Your second point that you can never be penalised for linking to a bad site is simply wrong. Google states the following on its information for webmasters page:

Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighbourhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

What your being confused with is Google's webmasters facts statting that there is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking. The key words being almost and nothing!

Stating that you could get a competitors site penalised, is actualy possible, I'm not going to explain how for obvious reasons. In fact Google has changed its webmasters facts page as mentioned above and now states this:

Fiction: A competitor can ruin a site's ranking somehow or have another site removed from Google's index.

Fact: There is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.

The above page used to state that there was nothing but has since been revised.

Just thought I would make this clear for everyone.

At least this time all the major playas are doing something productive!

Originally Posted by Jamesanderson

Fiction: A competitor can ruin a site's ranking somehow or have another site removed from Google's index.

Fact: There is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.

The above page used to state that there was nothing but has since been revised.

Just thought I would make this clear for everyone.

Probably those who are active with this forums travel a lot and I was out for a while too.

Thanks for correcting between "almost nothing" and "was nothing" and probably I was with was.

Originally Posted by thevirus

At least this time all the major playas are doing something productive!

That was exactly my point, in order for spam to be reduced it has to be fought on every frontline e.g. on all search engines.

There is no point one SE penalising or fighting one type of spam and the others focusing on another. To fight spam the SE's have to communicate with each other and decide what measures have to be put in place. In fact before they can even get that far they will have to decide what they actually consider spam. One mans marketing is another mans spam.

This is great news though, just the fact that the three big players must have started to communicate is fantastic. May be in the not so distant future all the SE's will display the same list of what they consider to be spam. Most of them display nothing at present; leaving webmasters having to guess what each SE considers spam.

In all honesty though, eradicating spam completely will probably be impossible, as soon as you introduce measures to fight one type, another type will start. The intelligent spammers seem to always be one step a head of the game, and let’s face it, some of the cleverest programmers, marketers, SEO’s etc. use spammy techniques and get a lot of success. Convincing them to opt for a more ethical approach will be just as difficult.

One thing for sure though, is the next 12 months will be very interesting to see how much more communication happens between MSN, Yahoo and Google and if any of the other SE's join in.