Two New Tools in the Fight Against Spam: No Follow & Soft Blocking

[Eric Suesz]

We’ve been working hard to remove the ability for spambots to penetrate your Ning Network with bogus accounts. Beginning today, we have two new weapons in our arsenal: No Follow and Soft Blocking. These new approaches should make Ning even more safe and secure for your members. 

No Follow

Spambots attempt to create as many fake accounts as possible, which then attempt to post as much content as possible. Any content that is posted by a spambot will, of course, contain a link to some Web site somewhere. The more links a spammer can build up, the higher up in search those spammy links travel in Google search — until they are ultimately near the top of Google’s search results, competing side-by-side with legitimate businesses. 

One way to take away this incentive for spammers is to add a special tag which tells Google to ignore such links when compiling their search results. This is the “nofollow” tag. With No Follow, links work fine. Click on them and you’ll still go to the same place, but those clicks won’t be calculated in Google’s search results. This thwarts one of the major reasons behind a coordinated spam attack. It can be very effective. 

How will this affect your Ning Network? The No Follow tag will be added to all links posted by members on blogs (including comments), forum posts (including comments), and profile comments. There are a few key exceptions:

• Links from NCs and admins won’t get the No Follow tag. Obviously, there’s no danger of you posting spam on your own Ning Network, so the No Follow tag won’t be added to any of your links. 

• Links on the Main Page won’t get the No Follow tag. We want to ensure your Main Page loads quickly for your members and avoid performing any additional analysis that could affect your Main Page’s performance. 

Soft Blocking 

One of the unfortunate side effects of beating spam is that occasionally the rules that are created to catch spammers can catch a legitimate member. We’ve had reports of this, and we take it very seriously. We’re doing our best to ensure members aren’t blocked from using Ning even if their account is flagged in error. To help combat it, we’ve instituted soft blocking.

In the past, when suspicious accounts have been blocked for an excessive rate of posting, the account has been prevented from signing in to Ning. Now, when an account is blocked for excessive posting, that account will be prevented from adding comments, updates, blog posts, forum posts, and photos and videos — content. However, navigation and browsing won’t be affected, just the ability to post content. After a set amount of time, a soft-blocked account will be allowed to post again. Most important: Anyone who experiences a soft block will receive a clear error message, along with information on how to proceed. 

Of course, if you ever have problems signing in or participating on your Ning Network for any reason, we encourage you to open a Help Center ticket, and our advocacy team will investigate the details. 

[Almir]

These two are nice, one more you should consider is requiring email verifying to be able to post or upload anything... it's not an ideal solution but will keep some of those bots away...

Each click is a “vote” on Google. The more clicks they get, the higher up in search those spammy links travel

I'm not sure this is correct at all :) Each link without nofollow is a vote for Google, click is not

[Eric Suesz]

Hi, Almir. I pasted in an earlier draft of this I was writing and then changed it about a minute later. You saw it fast! You have eagle eyes.

[Janettee McCrary]

I like the "Soft Blocking" thing but the "No Follow" means that NO links, not even legitimate ones, other than the Creator's and Admins', will be able to up their ranking, right?

[Janettee McCrary]

Exactly my point.

[Kris]

"No Follow" won't prevent your members blog post on your network from getting indexed.

Any links posted on your site aka links that if clicked by a member would navigate from your site just don't get any link juice. In other words your site PR isn't be passed a long and this is a very good thing because the last thing you want is to be passing link juice to a bad domain such as an XXX or Pharm site as this could affect your Serp rankings.

More info on "NoFollow" here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

[Phil McCluskey]

Hi MJH,

Google and the other search engines still index links that are marked as nofollow, so the link would still appear in Google's search results. The only thing that's prevented is the passing of PageRank from the site where the link appears.

[Kris]

not true

1) your site could be indexed for the "breaking news"

2) your just not passing link juice to that site but amusing that site is credible Google should already be crawling and indexing it on its own

The only people I can see having an issue with "No Follow" are people who are selling links based on PR. Last time I checked it was against Google webmaster guidelines to sell links.

[Kris]

in theory its not suppose to as using a the No Follow your telling the serps you don't necessarily support the content it first developed to help the blogs from getting attacked. In theory if you had a competing blog you just needed to sneak some bad neighbor links to move ahead of the competition.

I would much prefer seeing the ability to add links be granted after so many actions.

[Almir]

No, MJH... it doesn't have anything with indexing that particular blog on your network... it just doesn't pass any link juice to any link inside that blog post so it gives you even more chance to rank for that post since all link juice stays within that post

[Kris]

why not do some thing like the forums where you can't even post a link until XX number of post. If some one is dropping a link in the first couple of post their usually trying to promote (spam) something weather its a bot or a real person.

[Chris]

Great! A few small questions, if you don't mind:

- Does this also apply to networks which are private (therefore links don't matter) or have restricted membership (e.g. invite only or member moderation?)

- Will NC's be alerted when one of their members is "Soft Blocked"? I feel this is important as they are our members, after all...

- Will "soft-blocked" members be directed to seek help on Ning.com or on the network on which they're blocked? It could be confusing to members who don't know what Ning is (they might think that their account has been hacked etc.) plus many of us pay to remove Ning branding...

Thanks!

[Eric Suesz]

Admin or NCs who post links will not get a No Follow, Miles. When you say limited content rights I want to make sure I understand, so clarify if you can. Also, I don't believe it affects pages, just the links. Thanks!