bedeviled mojo slop

I'll update this post later after the official announcement is made

Sorry to be a little cryptic earlier, but when someone writes to me and says, "Here's some information that I don't want you to talk about for awhile", I oblige. I was contacted by Google in regards to a method to make comment spam a thing of the past, or at the very least, ineffectual. Here is an excerpt from the Google blog post on "Preventing comment spam".

If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

MSN Search and Yahoo! will also support this link attribute. It's great to see the search engines come together to support this attribute.

This is real cooperation as Dave Winer noted. It's such a simple way to discourage comment spammers as their links will no longer count towards increased visibility in search engine rankings.

I will be updating blojsom in the next few days to support this initiative via our plugin API. In addition, there are a number of comment and trackback moderation plugins for blojsom that enable you to decide which comments or trackbacks eventually get posted to your site.

For further reading: Dave Winer. Six Apart. CNet. eWeek.