I recently noticed a tag that has been showing up on html pages, that of the rel="nofollow".  Not knowing what this tag was about I decided to do a little investigation and thought the results were worth mentioning on my blog. 

What is it?

Apparently this tag is a (relatively) new effort to combat comment spam.  If you look at The Official Google Blog they describe how they handle the nofollow tag:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank web sites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

It turns out that they are not alone in ignoring the nofollow tag.  Yahoo and MSN appear to follow the same behavior and ignore links with this tag.  And let's not forget that many blog engines and related services have modified their engines to automatically place the nofollow tag on all comments made to their member blogs.

So what's the big deal?

Well if you do some searches for the tag name you will notice there are some unhappy people out there that feel very strongly against the nofollow tag.  The basic argument is that when someone leaves a comment on your blog they then should be given credit (in terms of index rankings and calculations).  In addition, there are already ways to catch comment spam and the nofollow tag indiscriminately targets everyone who leaves comments.

Also, it seems that perhaps Google's has another reason for wanting this tag.  According to a Wikipedia submission there is a new initiative to repurpose the nofollow tag to prevent paid links from getting credit in search engine results.  Imagine the impact this would have on businesses that have spent a lot of money in online ads to try and influence the search engine results.

My Take

Personally I believe the use of the nofollow tag is wrong.  Preventing comment spam is very important yet there are tools already available to counter this issue.  To discriminate against everyone seems like the wrong approach to solve such a specific issue like comment spam.  Also, if someone has left a comment on my blog then I would hope that they get credit by the search engines.  Participation is what makes the web go around. 

Take action!

So spread the word and remove those nofollow tags.  For those of you using a hosted blog engine like WordPress you can find Plug-Ins like this one that can strip out the nofollow tags.