Movable Type nofollow plugin

The annoncement of the Movable Type nofollow plugin is a result of the problem with comment spam and Page Rank.

The search team at Google approached us with the idea of flagging hyperlinks with a rel="nofollow" link attribute in order to alert their search spider that a particular link shouldn't be factored into their Page Rank calculations. The Yahoo and MSN search teams have also indicated they'd support this new spec, and we'll be implementing and deploying this specification as quickly as possible across all of our platforms around the world.
Read the Six Apart blog entry

The outpouring of support and debate over a little HTML is the direct result of the mountain of comment spam that most blogs are buried under each day. Comment spammers post fake comments on blogs, guestbooks, and other places online with links to their spam sites in hopes that Google will index those pages and increase their Page Rank. The main idea is that, when Google, MSN, and Yahoo! begin removing links with the attribute applied from their Page Rank calculations, spammers will no longer have any motivation to continue deluging websites with comments about cialis, viagra, and lonely housewives. Some people online aren't so sure that this is the best solution.
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January 19, 2005 07:55 AM | Posted in Movable Type