January 18, 2005
Control Blog Link Spam
This is kind of related to SEO stuff, but I'm not going to put it in that section since it is more far reaching.
All of the major search engines, Six Apart (makers of MovableType) and other blog software manufacturer's have taken the first step to help blog owners combat the weight given by the search engines to Blog Comment Spam.
Basically, they've introduced an attribute you can place in links at the A HREF level which will signal to the search engines not to give any weight to non-approved links. The new attribute is rel="nofollow" which is to be placed in the A HREF tag.
Some of the press releases are:
MSN Search's Blog
Google's Blog
Yahoo's Blog
Six Apart's Announcement
It's a good first step in trying to give control over links posted to others back to the blog owners. Hopefully Forum/Guestbook manufacturer's will also adopt the policy for non-staff supplied links.
If you want to see what the code looks like after you install the MovableType plugin, view the source of this thread with my "Test" comment showing. ;-)