Support for nofollow

We're a blogging company, and as such, we tend to be keenly aware of problems that webloggers encounter. One of the recurring issues that our users face -- on TypePad, Movable Type, and LiveJournal -- is a need to distinguish between content that they have published themselves and content that is generated by a site's readers and commenters. This is important for a number of reasons, the most prominent of which in recent times is comment spam. We've been working on the comment spam problem for some time now, both from the standpoint of the costs incurred by users and and the techniques that can be used to fight the spammers. Recently, we published our Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam with a very broad range of background information, along with tactics on how to keep your site spam-free. As has been discussed in the past, the goal of weblog spammers (currently, at least) is not necessarily to get blog visitors to click through on the links they submit, but rather to get search engines to count those link towards their link ranking scores. This makes the identification of user-submitted comment essential. Recently, we've reached out to other blog tool vendors to try to coordinate information about comment spam techniques and behaviors. As part of these efforts, we've also begun to talk to search companies about enriching linking semantics to better indicate visitor-submitted content (like comments or TrackBacks). 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 PageRank 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. * For TypePad subscribers, implementation will be automatic. Links from commenters will be flagged automatically in the next update, which will be deployed within the next 24 hours. * For Movable Type users, we're shipping a plugin today to enable support on Movable Type-powered sites. The Movable Type website has full details, including a download link. * LiveJournal also plans to implement the specification for comments from other members who are not friends. If you'd like more information about how the process works, we'll be posting a complete overview on the Professional Network site. We'll also be discussing more about the increasing need for link semantics on the web, especially now that there are millions of people contributing content to the web every day. The rel="nofollow" specification is not the end-all mechanism of stopping comment spam, but it's a significant step, and a good partnership between weblogging vendors and search companies. It's also a great example of the speed at which a new specification can be developed, implemented, and deployed in this medium.