Professional PHP

The rel nofollow thing is getting blogged to death today, but here are my two cents.

This won’t stop comment spam any more than spam filters stop email spam. The economics are still on the spammers side. This may have devalued the pot of gold to a pot of silver, but there will still be prospectors. Spammers will only get more sophisticated with their automated programs and the spam they leave.

I think pings and trackbacks tend to conserve PR in the blogosphere[1]. Devaluing these may devalue some of the PR power of blogs in general. I am not sure this is going to benefit bloggers all that much in the long term.

I think the big benefactors of this are the search engines. The SERPS will improve somewhat as the “involuntary votes” get cleaned out.

Also, I think google will probably ignore this attribute on internal links to prevent SEO PR funneling. This probably means there are probably some new opportunities for blackhat SEO by controlling how PR is passed between networks of sites. I bet a bunch of reciprocal link checking software is getting worked on today to check for this attribute.

[1] Am I the only one who hates the term blogosphere?