...Paul told me that Google is planning on announcing support for a <rel=”nofollow”> tag on individual <A> links. Any link with this tag will indicate to a crawler it is not necessarily approved by this page and shouldn’t be followed nor contribute weight for ranking. Our Search Champs suggested this and it has been a part of our plans since, we think it’s a great idea.
I quickly circulated this around our hallway and also to the MSN Spaces team – and we got quick agreement from both teams. Over the coming weeks, our MSNBot crawler will start respecting this new tag, and sometime after that MSN Spaces will start to support this as well (I expect Mike Torres and MC will have more details – the team has already made investments to help prevent blog spam to begin with). Cheers to Yahoo! and Six Apart for also supporting this movement....
What a brilliant idea! Now the thousands of blog contributors that honestly comment on someone else's blog are considered spammers exactly like those few ones that spammers are indeed: spammers win again, legitimate contributors lose again.
Spam-fear is the new Internet drug and unfortunately the spammers are its pusher and the internet community is addicted. After terrific email spam filters that think that an email from your mom is spam just because she asks you to call her, and so you will never read it, because it's directly moved into the trash-can, now the "engeniuos" rel=follow attribute will keep all the legitimate commenters away from the blogs and will encourage the spammers to spam even more.
Why should i give my contribution to a competititor blog if all i get back is:"you are a spammer, because you are commenting my blog"?
You spam-crusaders are ridiculous: you are destroying the spirit of the Internet! You don't want spam on your comments? MODERATE THEM, you lazy! That maybe MSN or Google or Yahoo do not have enough money to pay an employee to moderate a blog with 300 (!!!) comments per days? That maybe the small blog owner gets hundreds of comments per day on his blog?? Come on guys, if you cannot moderate 10 comments per days or in the 90% of cases even a couple of comments per week, stop blogging and go for a holiday!
Moderation is the ONLY way to fight spam and to not penalize the honests: spammers have their own blacklist of sites being difficult to be spammed; start moderating and you will see that spammers will stay away from your site. The rel=nofollow attribute is just rubbish and it will be a catastrophe, you will see. And especially giants like Microsoft will not be immune from this catastrophe.
Imagine the huge community hating Microsoft and going to spam thousands of blogs (and not only) with links back to Microsoft with the attribute rel=nofollow. Or imagine this scenario: all the 581,000 sites linking back to Yahoo decide to boycott Yahoo's express inclusion policy and put a rel=nofollow attribute on their links to Yahoo; the results would theoretically be that Yahoo does not have any site linking back to them, officially.
Unfortunately, i suspect that Google MSN and Yahoo would implement this new filter on their algorythms with an exception: links to Google, MSN and Yahoo sites would be immune from the rel=nofollow attribute. They win, spammers win, we lose.
Here we will not implement this ridiculous idea, and we will check all the links in the comments for being sure to delete the rel=nofollow attribute so, spammers, you are welcome to come and try to spam this blog. We will moderate, and if your link it is not approriate or related to the topic, your comment will be simply deleted...in the name of the only possible crusade against spam: (rel=nofollow)=NOFOLLOW!
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