Simon Willison: New anti-comment-spam measure He plans on redirecting all URLs through his own script, therefore presumably no Google PR juice would be granted by leaving a comment at his blog. I found it interesting at the time of this writing that his Google PR was zero for his blog entry while his main page was PR7. This is how page ranks work for most blogs. The main page link is where the value of interlinking is, not in the archives or in the supplemental comments, so running all comments — which will mostly be legitimate ones, BTW — through a script and blocking the SE bots with a no robots.txt file is not really going to hurt the spam commenters that much, is it? Maybe I’m missing something here.

I do see one interesting aspect to this and that’s where he could run a counter to determine how many outclicks are being sent from all commenters to his blog. This would determine by domain (or even URL) who’s getting all the comment hits. I certainly don’t click on obvious comment spam, but wonder if others do, really? A thorough analysis of the numbers would reveal whether it is really worth getting this anal on blog comments or not. My guess, and it’s just a guess, is that most traffic through comments is going to those who leave good, relevant comments, not those who blatantly spam the blog entry.