Micah Dubinko blogs on rel=”nofollow” being a failure. I have to agree that this doesn’t really stop comment spammers currently. I still believe that it will help on the long run, since most blog software will now use it by default. And people have to upgrade from time to time due to the lastest PHP security issue…

However, I would like Google or other search engines to offer some “spam submission”. It would be best if they had a common submission server.

Then we could use the moderation tools of our blogs to submit these bad URLs to Google, who in turn could take measures to strip them off their index (e.g. by moderating indexing for these URLs, reducing their pagerank, freezing their ranking for some weeks etc.)

I’m of course aware of abuse possibilities (e.g. spam with your competitors URL); but most comment spam I’ve seen so far uses new sites anyway. I think you can detect these by charcteristical URLs, site contents, incoming links etc.

As for myself, I’ve never enabled comments on my blog for the very reason that I’m not willing to moderate all that spam. In my guestbook (which is mostly to reduce the number of emails I get because of certain popular contents of my german web page; people will happily post in my guestbook instead of sending me an email now), I’ve recently enabled a very simple filter. It will just reject any entry which contains http:// anywhere. My users don’t need that, and it has reduced spam to 0 again. And I don’t care for the entries there anyway. ;-)