New Google tag... rel="nofollow"?
Scoble mentioned this morning that Google would be announcing a new tag today, so I've been keeping my eyes peeled. Anne van Kesteren just blogged about it - it looks like it's rel="nofollow".
Simon Willison seems to spell it out the best:
Reading between the lines (which in this case isn't
particularly hard), this and this
(don't forget to view source) suggest that Google are
soon to announce that they won't be calculating PageRank
for links with a
rel="nofollow" attribute.
Finally, an official way of fighting the economics of
comment spam by denying PageRank on user-submitted link
content. Sam Ruby points to Mark Pilgrim's prediction
that spammers won't care - they'll spam anyway, on the
offchance that they hit somewhere undefended. I'm
optimistic - if the major weblog (and wiki) vendors get
behind this one it could help stem the tide.
This is cool - it lets content link sources control the page rank boost they give to the link target - perfect for comment spam, forum spam, etc. Let's hope that Mark Pilgrim is wrong - if this really does make comment spam ineffective, maybe it will at least slow down a bit.