Blogger has long been plagued by low-tech spam comments.
Given the recent firm stance on unearned links, it is refreshing to see that this is finally being addressed.
Anyone with a Blogspot blog will know that comment spam is rife within Blogger.
Whilst commenters’ names and any links in the comments had the attribute rel="nofollow, any blog which allowed anonymous commenting (which is a huge proportion of the blogs in the Blogger community) could easily be spammed.
Simply posting a comment and electing to use the ‘Nickname’ method of identifying themselves allowed spammers to enter a nickname such as <a href="http://blog.netrank.co.uk/">Search Engine Optimisation</a>, which would then be displayed as a clean, followable, PageRank passing link, thus: Search Engine Optimisation
As of this weekend this has been changed so that the nickname is displayed in full in plain text, for example: <a href="http://blog.netrank.co.uk/">Search Engine Optimisation</a>. Additionally this change has been implemented retroactively, so that existing spam links have also become plain text.
Whilst this is an excellent piece of news for ethical search professionals, I was going to write a nice post about the dual standards of Google today, based largely on this bug, and now I shall have to think of something else to write about.