One minute you're saying the individual blogger cannot benefit from nofollow, the next you're saying that bloggers are rejoicing because they have more control of ranking they indirectly award to sites they link. (Of course, maybe you think those bloggers are silly to think they are significant in any way.) Which one is it?

I never claimed nofollow was some sort of panacea. nofollow makes spam less profitable, period.

Hashcash users cannot reject an unstamped (or invalidly stamped) message outright. When everybody uses it and software becomes better trusted and debugged, they will; but until then the only reasonable way to use it is with a scoring filter, and never set the scores high enough that the binary decision about a message is made solely by its hashcash status. "Make no mistake, we're talking about a pretty large time scale here."

I also never claimed comment spam was useful solely because it influences rankings. (I don't know why you insist to think that I did.) Spammers will spam where they expect return on their investment. Period. What I do claim is that comment spam's ability to influence rankings — and especially to "hijack" the top hits in large search engines — is an entirely new class of opportunity for spammers, which gave them hella lot of incentive to start doing it. Of course there's inertia, and of course they won't stop just because you take some of the profit away. If suddenly litigation rises a hundredfold, spam won't stop either. But all other things being equal, I believe that it will slow down.

In reply to Re^7: (OT) nofollow considered harmful by gaal
in thread CPAN::Forum opens its virtual doors by szabgab

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.