Although I don’t read it as much as I used to, Slashdot is a true powerhouse of content and traffic (not to mention one of the most established tech sites out there). A long-time friend of mine (who just happens to be a programmer) sent me a blog post about Slashdot from a few days ago, thinking I might enjoy it. He was right.

Apparently Jeremiah Grossman of White Hat Security has figured out a sneaky (albeit temporary) way to setup incoming links from Slashdot, and believe it or not they don’t contain the dreaded no-follow attribute.

It’s not difficult to do at all, but is probably old news for any dedicated spammer and I’m sure the exploit is being thoroughly abused right now. Jeremiah claims that the pages actually do get indexed by the engines, although my check of his example page showed no cache date in any of the engines so far.

Will it help your rankings? Probably not. Is it ethical? As Big Ern McCracken would say, “I don’t know. It’s fun though isn’t it?”.