Ken Moss, the General Manger of MSN Search Dev & Test announced in the MSN Search WebLog their support of the new NoFollow tag.
Ken stated …
“I was excited to wake up this morning to an email from my long-time friend and college roommate who is currently an engineer working on search at Google. Don’t worry Paul – I won’t blog any outrageous stories about our time at Princeton. 🙂
Paul told me that Google is planning on announcing support for a tag on individual A links. Any link with this tag will indicate to a crawler it is not necessarily approved by this page and shouldn’t be followed nor contribute weight for ranking. Our Search Champs suggested this and it has been a part of our plans since, we think it’s a great idea.
I quickly circulated this around our hallway and also to the MSN Spaces team – and we got quick agreement from both teams. Over the coming weeks, our MSNBot crawler will start respecting this new tag, and sometime after that MSN Spaces will start to support this as well (I expect Mike Torres and MC will have more details – the team has already made investments to help prevent blog spam to begin with). Cheers to Yahoo! and Six Apart for also supporting this movement.”
I find this incredible! A company the size of Microsoft can actually make a decision based on an email he received this morning! Did this not get to Legal for God’s sake … What were they thinking?
I’m kidding of course … but I still find it interesting that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft could all agree on anything …. this quickly.
murdok is the CEO of Murdok, Inc. which publishes over 200 websites and email newsletters.
Rich also publishes his blog WebProBlog which focuses on internet business and marketing trends.
