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The topic rel="nofollow" is hot now, originally seeded in the Googleblog post Preventing comment spam. Many developers are discussing it to a large extent, like Anne Van Kesteren, Erik J. Barzeski, Jeff Moore, Molly E. Holzschlag and Chuq Von Rospach (just to name a few), who brings out the essentials.

So, what's it all about? First, let me quote a part of the Googleblog post:

If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites 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.

Especially the last phrase is true: The spammers won't benefit, yes, but I, as a blogger, won't benefit, too, sadly. Simply put, that is because rel="nofollow" won't keep spammers away from my comment form.

Although it's a good idea, what I don't like, is, that this kind of spam solution doesn't help me as blogger at all - however, it just makes sure that comment spam does not get indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.

Furthermore, I don't think spammers would care about that, as they don't care about spam filters or Blacklists, anyway. They would just continue spamming as ususal. In fact, spammers do care very little about, if their URLs get through, or they emails reach their intended recepients. They don't even check blogs, if HTML tags are allowed to format the comment source. So, in this field, too, remains doubt, if the suggested technique will bring more good, or more harm...

Additionally, by using rel="nofollow" one will also miscredit trustworthy commenting users. What about them? I think, it's great, that "normal" commenting users eventually get a better pagerank through my blog (as I do by commenting in other blogs). Therefore, this prevention restricts the "normal" user, because usually you wouldn't even keep a spamming user's comment on your blog. Or would you?

So, to summarize, I think Jeff Moore said it best:

I think the big benefactors of this are the search engines.