Introduction of nofollow

Comment Spam is a big subject in the blog world and now there might be a solution to our pains. While everyone was fighting the comment side, Google came up with a solution to just not make the search side a problem. ;) Comment spam comes from the fact that if you comment and leave a link, it will possibly be followed by Google, indexed faster, and gets a higher PageRank. Now the big ones out there will add a tage to all the links saying _re=”nofollow”_ which will tell search engine bots that the link should not be followed. Google Blog has a post about it stating the the search engine and blogger will support it and they also have a list who else will which includes among others (I added a few and left out a few) Six Apart (for TypePad, MoveableType and LiveJoural [non friends], WordPress, MSN (for both search and spaces), Yahoo search and Blogg.de. John Battelle already raised his voice stating that while he loves the idea, he is not sure if it will not have some adverse side effects. This is obviously a hard thing to think about, which is why I agree with him, I am not sure if this will. The conversation might be more broken up, there might be less possibility to find the origin of a conversation. Then again, if I link from within my blog, I will be giving all the pagerank, authority and trust that I can and should be giving. So in this case, I think it is highly likely that this will be very good. But we will see how the comment spam will develop from here on out, at least the blogosphere is buzzing on nofollow already. In Summary: I like it. Very cool and my congratulations to everyone involved in working on this so cooperatively or at least having no huge discussions about whether some other tag or something else wouldn’t have been better. Very KISS.