Google has joined the initiative to fight/prevent comment spam. It has introduced a new tag called “nofollow”. When Google comes across a hyperlink with this tag, it will ignore these links and not give any credit to them.
Read more about it in the Google Blog post (Jan 18, 2005).
Movable Type already supports comment moderation i.e. comments do not show up online till they are approved. But even deleting the unapproved comment spam is a real headache. I get about 20 to 30 comment spam on an average each day. Movable Type released a Guide to Comment Spam some days back (Jan 4, 2005).
Update (09:30 PM 1/20/2005): Have installed the MT nofollow plugin. Now, the links in the comments will automatically have the “nofollow” tag added to them. So, Google and other search engines will ignore those links.
Update (12:52 PM 1/21/2005): Read related article at news.com
Useful, Informative, Interesting
The URL given below should have the “nofollow” tag:
http://www.cnn.com/
More info at: http://www.movabletype.org/news/2005/01/movable_type_nofollow_p.shtml