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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Second thoughts
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I've started to doubt that the noFollow thing will put a serious dent in spam. Don't get me wrong - having the ability to mark a link as ineligible for crawling is useful in and of itself, and will at least help with bogus page-rank. However, it's not going to fix the problem itself.
Look at the strategy behind email spam - the cost of sending the email approaches zero, so the spammer only needs a miniscule response rate to make it worth their while. This is in contrast to direct mail, where there are actual costs involved. Over time, sending mails back to people who never buy anything has a real cost - doing the same with email is virtually cost-free. Sadly, the same thing applies to spam in comments, referer lists, and wiki pages. Page rank is a nice bonus for these people, but it's not really the driver. With no actual costs, they can keep pounding away, happy to receive whatever tiny percentage of click-throughs they get.
For an example, just look at the spam pounding that the UIUC VW Wiki has been getting. Yesterday, more than 100 pages were defaced, most likely by a script. They ended up getting restored quickly (see my previous post), but over the course of the day yesterday there were 3 mass defacings. None of them stayed up long enough to guarantee a bot crawl - but they were up long enough to get found, and for some small percentage of people to - gosh knows why - click through.
While this is a good and useful idea, I don't think that the level of celebration ringing through the blogosphere is warranted - the impact of this will be minimal at best.
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