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Can The Followers Gadget Link My Blog To Spammers, And To Their Blogs?

The hugely popular Blogger / Google accessory, Following, has been with us for almost 3 years. Thanks to ongoing activity by hackers, porn merchants, and spammers, unfortunately, some folks still have misgivings as to whether they should blindly publicise (and backlink) strangers (and their blogs), when they Follow our blogs.
Does the Followers gadget, on my blog, subject my blog to possible classification as a spam blog, should a spammer decide to Follow my blog?
This is a perfectly understandable fear, considering the pain suffered by so many, when asking for their blog to be restored from spurious spam classification, in a discussion in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken.

Fortunately, this fear, though understandable, is spurious. Google provides the Following gadget, with our Followers isolated from our blogs, by using JavaScript. Take a look at the source code for the Followers gadget, some time. You will not see a list of HTML based links, to your Followers. What you will see is JavaScript code.

Long known as a problem for our blogs and websites, when we use JavaScript code to connect our blogs - because the search engine spiders cannot follow JavaScript based links - the use of JavaScript, in the Followers gadget, ensures that no porn or spam scanning spider will jump from our blogs to any Follower. Specifically, this protects our blogs from automated attack by a malicious Follower with hacking, porn, or spam connections.

Rest assured, having the Followers gadget on your blog does not present an automated threat to the future of your blog.

All that said, you will still do well to manually scan for, and block, any Follower with dodgy links in her / his profile. Just don't worry about automated threats - and don't remove the Followers gadget because of unfounded fear.

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Comments

Hi Chuck .. thanks for this and the link back to your previous post - helpful information ..

Cheers Hilary

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