Steve Rubel posted today about a technique Google’s supposedly testing out that will remove the incentive for comment spammers.
The technique relies on using the “rel” attribute of the anchor tag. It would look something like this…
Steve cited a post on David Winer’s blog about “staying tuned” for some super duper cool announcement that’s coming soon. Another blogger gives the skinny. Here are a few more references as well. Simon says
“Google are soon to announce that they won’t be calculating PageRank for links with a rel=”nofollow” attribute. Finally, an official way of fighting the economics of comment spam by denying PageRank on user-submitted link content. Sam Ruby points to Mark Pilgrim’s prediction that spammers won’t care – they’ll spam anyway, on the offchance that they hit somewhere undefended. I’m optimistic – if the major weblog (and wiki) vendors get behind this one it could help stem the tide.”
If it’s true then I wonder what the implications are for XFN links using the rel attribute to denote specific classes of relationships for sites being linked to. I mean, what if someone wants to link to their ex girlfriend’s site but they don’t want to pass PageRank on to the site cause they want to outrank her for her name? Huh? What happens in that case?
I think someone needs to call dibs on the rel attribute of the href tag quick before it gets gobbled up.
Jason Dowdell is a technology entrepreneur and operates the Marketing Shift blog.
