A Day in Paradise

After a bit a couple rumours banging around google finally annouced the decision to fight blog comment spam by ignoring links that had the “rel=nofollow” attribute.

MSN and Yahoo quickly jumped on board. Technocrati started an official Draft Specification for the new “standard”.

Livejournal, Movable Type, Blogger, Wordpress, and wikipedia were among som leading blog software creators and community sites which quickly gave their support to the initiative. Serendipity developers created a plugin to allow the blog owners to implement this functionality, but issued an open statement to Google in opposition of the new “standard”.

Searchenginewatch put up an indepth article explaining the new feature, as well as started a discussion thread on the topic. The discussion quickly moved on to Slashdot.

noNofollow.net was fired up to oppose the nofollow scheme and listed 12 reasons why it will not work. www.linkcondom.com put up their humorous interpretation of the no follow tag. Other prominant figures such as Mark Pilgrim voiced doubt over the effectiveness of the scheme.

A discussion on Flickr, quickly revealed an implementation bug in Flickr’s filtering.

Whether you are for or against the nofollow tag, it will be a round for a while. A simple tweak of the default Firefox stylesheet allow users to highlight “nofollow” links. More information here, and an indepth explaination here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 6th, 2005 at 2:49 pm and is filed under PHP, Reeeeely Geeeky, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.