Google Blog 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.
But what you haven't heard yet is where Tucows comes out on this initiative. Well, here's the skinny - We love rel="nofollow".
Not only is this a great step forward to deal with some of the *problems* that bloggers face, but I'm pretty convinced that it also creates some opportunities for bloggers - and other content providers. I'm particularly intrigued by the notion, as Scoble points out, that this makes linking to another website frictionless.
In addition to the support that this proposition has gotten from the Blogware Team, I'm looking forward to exploring how we can leverage this to the benefit of customers using some of our other services.
Nice work Web! Its great to see the big movers supporting something of this importance with such unanimity.
