Comments back ON - Support for "nofollow" enabled

Wow a bit of collaboration on the part of the search engines. Is this the sign of a new age of "working together"? I hope so...

I have enabled comments again on the blog entries and hope to start adding some new hotspots soon I have been remiss. The reason? I think bloggers and search engines have come up with a simple, technically feasible solution to discouraging comments spammers.

Also I have installed support for the "nofollow" attribute in the <a href> tag. The purpose is to end comment spam, or at least curtail it. The major search engines and bloggers have agreed that any link with rel="nofollow" in it will not be spidered. I have installed the official plugin from SixApart, makers of MovableType, so that all links that are inserted into the comments and trackback fields have the rel="nofollow" automatically added. Spammers who add comments with links do not have anything to gain as the search engines will not follow their links any longer. Hurrah! I hope this actually works...

The caveat of course is that people who post real comments with links will not increase the ranking of the target site either... It is a double edged sword. Just be happy that links exist and are available in comments ;)