Simon Willison’s Weblog

Google approved PageRank stripping

11th May 2004

Blogger are now using the redirect-without-PageRank technique to protect their hosted blogs against comment spam (also used by Moveable Type). At the risk of sounding incredibly pleased with myself (which I am), that was my idea! Sweet.

Here’s the real kicker: the URL redirector they are using is hosted on Google’s primary domain. This is great news for people like myself who are running their own redirector, as the problem with having a redirect on your site is that it can be abused to make it look like people are visiting a specific site from a link on your domain: or even worse, to trick people in to visiting an unpleasant link (see Slashdot comments, where links are displayed along side the domain on which the “real” site is hosted). Now I can point my own PageRank stripper at http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=URL and let Google handle the redirects for me. Lovely.

Peter van Dijck recently joined the ranks of victims of wiki spam. Let’s start rolling this technique out on Wikis as well. The trade-off in lost PageRank for linked sites is more than worth it.