STOP! Everyone needs to take a few breaths and step back and consider for a moment what this really means. Noble idea? Yes. Does it address the problem? Somewhat. But, I hereby declare that killing an elephant with a fission bomb is overkill.

Consider what the wholesale implementation of this new web standard means within the blogosphere. “nofollow” is English for NO FOLLOW and common sense dictates that when spider finds this tag it will not follow the subsequent link. Six Apart and company have created plugins that apply this tag unselectively thereby destroying the power of blogs. Blogs are about community. Blogs are about linking. If we tag all comments and trackbacks as “nofollow” we have reduced the blogosphere to the status of the common, less connected web. This is a step backwards. More importantly, this is a win for the spammers. You see, we have given up our linking liberty to elimiate their impact within the web.

The proper way to implement this new tag is for each software provider to intelligently implement the tag in a way that negates the impact of anonymous posts and trackbacks but that does not impact links from known sources. Kudos to LiveJournal. They get it. Six Apart does not.

I agree that the implementation of a method that determines “known” trackback pings versus anonymous trackback pings will require thought but thought is *required*.

UPDATE: O.K., the nofollow tag does not suck. Forgive the tabloid headline. Insert implementations into the title between NOFOLLOW and sucks. “NOFOLLOW Implementations Suck!” Kudos to Google for the initiative. Kudos to LiveJournal for a reasonable implementation of “nofollow”

UPDATE TWO: Even more interesting, this blanket approach create a very real balance issue in the blogosphere. The big guys get bigger and the little (or new) guys can’t get any search engine exposure. A sort of blog “sandbox” in the approximate spirit of Google’s much discussed sandbox effect for new sites. Unlike Google’s sandbox effect, this new tag, once applied, would have very little chance of being removed. Let the conspiracy theorists loose!

According to Jeremy Zawodny on the Yahoo blog, the new “nofollow” tag is not just a Google solution; the comment spam defense is being implemented by every major player in the search / blogging universe. Implementing the new standard are: saerch engines Google, Yahoo, MSN, as well as blog software Blogger (from Google), TypePad, MovableType, LiveJournal (from Six Apart), MSN Spaces and WordPress.

Six Apart explains that they were approached by the Google Search team, who came up with the idea. TypePad subscribers will see “nofollow” implemented automatically in the next 24 hours. Movable Type has a plugin to install for it, available here. Finally, LiveJournal will be implementing it, but only for non-friends (which is actually kind of nice).

(Via InsideGoogle.)