On January 18, 2005 Google announced that you can now add the tag rel="nofollow" to your hyperlinks and Google will not give any credit to that hyperlink. The idea behind this is that comment spammers will either be deterred from submitting comment spam because they no longer get credit in Google's search index for the links they submit or if they aren't deterred at least they don't benefit from it by getting more credit for the website or websites they are trying to increase the rankings on.

Sounds like a great idea right? What about those people who take the time to read and make a comment on your blog and then leave a link to their blog? Shouldn't those people who are taking the time to read and comment on your blog get credit in Google for doing so? I mean don't they deserve a chance to increase their ranking.

Is there a chance that people will abuse this new tag? What's to prevent a website from putting rel="nofollow" on all their external links?

And in the long run will this really reduce the amount of comment spam? From what I know about the major players in comment spam is that they don't go out and manually select websites to submit their spam, but instead they write programs that find forms and then the program submits the spam. So unless the spammers update their software to ignore the sites that use the rel="nofollow" tag the amount of spam won't be reduced at all. And are spammers going to update their software so it doesn't submit to sites that use the new tag? I don't think so, because I think they will keep doing just out of spite.

So what's the right answer for comment spam? Since I've haven't received comment spam on this site yet I just don't worry about it. However, if I start receiving a lot of comment spam I will probably add a Captcha graphic to my comment form. A Captcha graphic is a simple graphic that contains numbers and letters that only a human can read. I the idea is simple, you can submit your comment if your can type in the same number and letters that are in the Captcha graphic. Humans should be the only ones that are able to submit the form because computers don't have a way to read the letters and numbers from the graphic. I've heard that websites that have started using this technique have had tremendous success.