In an announcement, Google has removed the ability to leave comments on Google Webmaster blog. The reasoning behind Google’s decision was “most of the time they were off-topic or even outright spammy.”
The irony is strong here, as Google themselves has to worry about spammy comments on the Google Webmaster blog itself. Most of the topics revolving around search quality, spam control and the nofollow attribute came from the blog.
Google said that effective last Friday, commenting on the Google webmaster blog has been disabled. Google said, “Over the years we read thousands of comments we’ve received on our blog posts on the Google Webmaster Central blog. Sometimes they were extremely thoughtful, other times they made us laugh out loud, but most of the time they were off-topic or even outright spammy; if you think about it, the latter is rather ironic, considering this is the Google Webmaster Blog.”
In regards to interacting with Google now that you’ve removed commenting on the blog, it wasn’t the best way to get a hold of them to begin with, as a Googler rarely responded to people anyway. According to Google, if you need, you can reach out on Twitter @googlewmc or post in the Google Groups help forums.
Did the nofollow end up failing Google?
The nofollow link attribute was introduced back in 2005 as a way of preventing comment spam. This is what Google’s plan was back in 2005, but it didn’t prevent comment spam. These days, it’s rare to see a blog that has comments enabled. When you do see comments in blogs, you’ll see them filled with comment spam, irrelevant content and spammy links. That’s assuming as well that the comments section also includes the nofollow link attribute.