Message Board

Bugs & Development

rel=nofollow

Author: C.Byrum (31 Jan 05 4:52pm)

I don't see anywhere in the instructions or forum where using 'rel=nofollow' on the links to your honeypot page is a wise decision.

Should this be used or not? It would prevent legitimate spiders from visiting the page, but maybe some spam crawlers would actually respect this?

Just wondering, because the only things to have ever visited my honeypot page are msn and google bot.

Re: rel=nofollow

Author: M.Prince (31 Jan 05 6:03pm)

We suggest you not use rel=nofollow on the links to your honey pot pages. We expect, and in fact in some ways count on, legitimate robots (such as Google) visiting the honey pot pages. These visits help us quantify the popularity of a particular honey pot and give us a way to assess our statistics. We actually use visits by Google as a sort of "heart beat" against which to quantify harvester traffic ("GoogleBeats").

There is no harm from legitimate robots visiting your honey pot. We use special tags which prevent the honey pot pages from being indexed or archived. We also can turn off addresses from being handed out to known-good robots.

In the future we may experiment by including links on honey pot pages and seeing what robots in fact respect tags like rel=nofollow. We'll probably build that functionality into the v0.2 version of the honey pot script. We'll send out an email when it's available for people to upgrade.

Thanks for your question! It's a good one that some people have been asking us via email as well.