Google announced today that they were implementing some changes to their PageRank system to help fight comment spam. The implementation is pretty simple, you simply add rel=”nofollow” to your hyperlinks, and the search engine will ignore it. Yahoo! and MSN are also participating, and most of the major blog publishing suites are incorporating the change.
I won’t really miss the couple of spams I get a week, but the existing protections I have in place have been more than adequate. Nicely done, folks. Deadsquidders, I’ll send you a note on how/when this gets implemented on your site. You probably won’t have to do a thing.
I’v actually been having a miserable time with blog spam, I’m going to have to make some changes… But I haven’t really been using the computer at home lately. Sigh.
I can’t help but notice that this mechanism won’t actually reduce spam – it will just make this particular method of spamming things less relevant to participating search engines. I don’t know how much of a dent that will actually put in the amount of comment spam.