(The above is a message to comment spammers.)
Comment spammers do their evil and fœtid thing in order garner high Google pageranks for their sites.
MT long ago set up the URL field in comments to automatically be set up as redirects (so that they couldn't be used for pagerank purposes), but comment spammers have long turned to posting their nasssssty links inside of the comments themselves.
So 6A has created the "nofollow" plugin. Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo have agreed that their search bots/spiders will no longer record links with with the rel="nofollow" attribute. The plug-in, in turn (as you have probably figured out) inserts that particular tag into all links in comments.
The plug-in has been tested in MT 3.x and 2.661.
TypePad users will have this automatically happen. LiveJournal plans to implement this for folks that aren't "friends" of the poster.
Very good. I'm not a fan of ad hoc extensions of standard syntax, but this seems a relatively harmless and acceptable cooperative action to -- well, if not stop comment spammers, at least discourage them. After all, once it's in place, comment spam (to garner pagerank) is useless.
IT DOESN'T WORK ANY MORE, ASSHOLES. GO AWAY. NOW. JUST. GO. AWAY.
I heartily recommend folks adopt it. I'm going to.
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Here's the info on this from Google.
According to that note, the nofollow tactic is also being adopted by Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, Buzznet, blojsom, and Blosxom. Sweet. (via J-Walk)
And that Google article points to these MSN Search and Yahoo Search articles on the subject.
As has been commented, this won't have an immediate effect on everyone. After all, this doesn't actually stop comment spam, just makes it less valuable. Until MT comes out with a version where this is native, though, it's doubtful there will be sufficient critical mass to make it worthwhile.
Still, every little bit helps.
Now I just have to figure out how to hack PMWiki to get the same 'auto-inclusion' of that tag.
Or find someone who has.
I'm guessing that will come pretty damned quickly.
Though it would be nice to be able to specify pages that were, or weren't, set up that way.
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