Google yesterday presented a method for marking up links that search engines are not supposed to follow, this in an attempt to restrain comment and guest book spam by not giving the spammers any chance of getting their pages seen by search engines just because they post links to them everywhere, using a method similar to the one Ian Hixie proposed back in August.

Yahoo! and MSN weren’t slow to join in the party and implement, or promise to implement, support for it; Google cannot of course be the ones that saved the Internet all by themselves. Unfortunately I have to agree with Andy Wismar, who writes that the spammers have won, with this solution, since unfortunately also the legitimate posters get punished, since their links too are marked up with the code that says that they are not to be followed.

To avoid that the search engines would index any spammy links in comments to this blog I have for a long time linked comments through a redirecting script that I have blocked using robots.txt, so in a way the spammers had already won over me. I will leave this redirection, even though I at the same time have implemented support for the new nofollow attribute.