I’ve been making a fuss about comment spam for some time now, and we’ve just introduced an image auth (Captcha) method here to stop the vast numbers we were suffering from here at HTMLfixIT. Well Google has introduced support for a new “rel=nofollow” link attribute which results in Google’s PageRank system ignoring the link. The point of this is that the comment spam is used by spammers to increase the PageRank (search engine rankings) for the sites linked in the spam. This new link attribute will make those links worthless to the spammers.
Yahoo and MSN have agreed to follow this move, so the result will be that there is no point comment spamming any more as it won’t count for anything anyway. Apparently many of the blog makers have agreed to add the new link attribute to their various products, but it’s really very trivial to add it yourself. As an added benefit to this, you can link to sites and subjects you don’t support without giving them a search engine boost. Read more at TheRegister or Eweek .
