Google Tag To Help Prevent Comment Spam

Lots of comment in the blogosphere overnight about the new anti-spam comment tag that Google announced yesterday. This is what it means. Someone leaves a comment in a post you've written, just like this one that someone did leave in one of my posts: My personal favorite is this one. The magic bit is the text I've highlighted in red: "rel=nofollow." It means that while the spam comment will still be there - this tag doesn't actually prevent spam - the spammer will derive no benefit at all in higher search engine ranking from click-throughs. The thinking here is that when the tag is widely implemented, there will be less incentive for spammers to use blog commenting as one of their spam weapons. Using the tag will be an automatic process - you the blogger don't do anything - with the changes taking place behind the scenes by your blog software. Clearly, this will take some time to be implemented by every software publisher and blog hosting service. But, in an amazing show of very quick backing for Google's initiative, support for the new tag has already been publicly stated by hosting services Six Apart (who own LiveJournal), Flickr and Movable Type), Bloxsom and Yahoo and as I commented recently. Using a IT Kitchen back in October - Anti Trackback and Comment Spam Methods. Prevention is surely better than cure. Neville Hobson is the author of the popular Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson's blog: