Fighting Comment Spam: nofollow
Thursday / 20 January 05
Comment spam isn’t much of a problem on this site, but for the last months it has become a significant problem for many other sites — especially if you’re using a widely used package such as WordPress or MovableType.
Now Google, Six Apart and other companies have announced the introduction of the nofollow relation for external links posted by users in comments. These links will not be followed by search engine spiders. Not many people are familiar with the rel attribute for anchors, even though XFN is completely based on it (something I hope to support within the near future).
Both articles do a good job at explaining the idea behind this measure and how it does not break any conventions or whatsoever. Personally, I am happy to see that companies are coming up with solutions for significant problems like these within the boundaries of web standards.
