Google has joined hands with MSN, Yahoo and Six Apart (Movable Type, Live Journal, etc) to announce a strategy to fight link spam. The spiders will now support a new tag that will indicate possible link spam and will allow the search engines to discount the links.


They will be using the non-std rel="nofollow" tag to highlight these links. The blog websites will be implementing them as default for all anonymous comments. I am sure that this will soon find its way in the various blog software, CMSs, etc. This is clearly good news in terms of deterring link spam from blog comments but it also is a public admission that Google's (MSN and Yahoo too) algorithm cannot handle this type of spam.

http://www.google.com/googleblog/200...ment-spam.html

This is excellent news, I must say. I came here to post the exact same news only to find that you beat me to it.

However I replaced the link in your message to point to the googleblog entry where they announced it.

Once I upgrade the forum script, this tag will be used extensively on this forum.

I feel though that there could be some unintended consequences of such an implementation. I would wait a couple of months before implementing it.

It is about time. I had one client who neglected her guestbook (something I already told her do not worry about adding but she wanted it) and within the span of three months, it had over 300 spammed entries! Some people have way too much time on their hands.

What could that possibly be? I for one, can't think of anything bad coming out of implementing such a thing.

I'd keep an eye on threads like these:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum12/2184.htm

Please tell me you don't take posts like that seriously.

This tag is too new...I don't discount anything. What I do know is that I'll continue using javascript for links I don't want SEs to follow.