A few months ago, Google and several other search and aggregation companies introduced rel="nofollow" tagging. Rather than rehash the arguments over that, I’ll simply point to Lachlan Hunt’s cogent analysis of nofollow and add one point: the nofollow relationship should have been defined in a metadata profile as an additional link type.
Despite the implementation, at least Google et al are well-intentioned: comment spam is harmful and needs to be stopped. Only a few attempts have ever made it through my various blocking mechanisms and appeared on my weblog, but the bandwidth the spammers eat up trying to find pages they can exploit is double or triple that of the legitimate users of this site. Perhaps if there were a way to prevent them from finding comment forms in the first place….
