Its nice to see the largest search engines come together for this one:
- Google: Preventing Comment Spam
- Yahoo: A Defence against comment spam
- MSN: Working together agains blog spam
- Moveable Type: Introducing the nofollow plugin
This new attribute has been marketed as a solution to comment spamming, but I for one highly doubt it will do much for it, at least not in getting the spammers to stop spamming blogs, guestbooks and any other dynamically based feedback systems.
The rel=nofollow attribute will however cut the spammers results for comment spam in the hosted blog systems that implement the new attribute, and it will also allow people like Scoble and yours truly to link to sites we would never have linked to before. Such as said spammers and other people we would never dream to give any Google juice.
Most of the comments I have seen for this new initiative for a better link-onomy has been positive, but there are naysayers as well:
The Register: Google’s No-Google tag blesses the Balkanized web
Anders made me aware of what might be a possible source for the idea of this new href attribute: Wired 12.1: “101 ways to save the Internet”, #75, on their “Google TO-DO list” they write, amongst others:
Let us link to a page we hate without boosting its ranking
Personally I don’t see myself implementing the new plug-in for MovableType for the nofollow attribute, my anti-spam features for this blog is working good as of now. I will only use it sporadically to link to sites I would otherwise think twice about linking to.
[Via Anders Jacobsen’s Blog]