bloggers rejoice! Fight spam!

http://www.google.com/googleblog/ Google has now made it so that you can purposely block links from giving credit using the rel="nofollow tag

Example
<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">discount pharmaceuticals</a> site

I think this will really help cut down on blog comment spam. Good on you google! BTW watch that your link partners dont start adding the tag heh

It's not just Google. MSN and Yahoo will be using it as well. Pretty much all the main blogging software will incorporate it too.

I will be incorporating it into all my vB forums as well. Stop post spam etc, not sure if I will go as far as signatures yet on most of them, but certainly some of them I may need to.

How should I use this on my website? Give no credit to affiliate program sites? Use it on my "contact" and "policy" pages?

The days of receiving PR credit from incoming affiliate links (and conversely losing pr) is over! Thanks for pointing this out.

I'd choose forums where it's possible to have a sig before a no sig forum anyday. I agree though, you should just get one or two links at most. As far as blog spam goes, this is a huge problem. I just don't know if this will be the answer.

Hopefully this will never get added to message boards like vBulletin!

There's a lot of buzz around this. Clipped from a sitepoint thread on the subject:
http://www.sixapart.com/log/2005/01...t_for_nof.shtml

Nintendo, there is nothing here that could not have been accomplished before (via url redirects and robots meta), so at the end of the day, it all depends on site admin.

I don't know, seems that this is pretty bad news. That means, more than likely, every single directory, forum, and blog software will incorporate this into their linking structure, rendering all natural links pointing to any of our sites worthless.

This can't be the only way to correct this. Just IMO I guess...

Won't this get abused in link exchanges - someone wants my link but fakes a link back - now I'll have to check to make sure the reciprocal link to me doesn't have the no-follow?

They could have done so with robots.txt, indirect links, robots meta tag... so one one more thing to check, but certainly not unique.

I agree. By making it super easy to stop links, most everyone will implement this "as default". In my forums, I was doing fancy redirects to stop spiders to follow links, and now I find it super easy to just put a nofollow in the href.

I think it's an interesting step and shows a lot of promise, but now, like was already stated, every non-coder with 1/16th of a brain can implement this. Just gotta start checking this for all links to your site is all.

When it gets popular and people start reading how to do that to keep from 'taking away PR'. People with 1/16th of a brain will start using it as a way to keep the PR because they will think it will pull down their site if they don’t.

That just took care of G link building problem, and some... I’d bet that most blog scripts like MovableType will start coming with it automatically.