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Will It Work?
And, finally, is it going to work? I dunno.
There are some definite problems with this strategy, not the least of which is that it means that if a friend or colleague pops by and posts an erudite comment—or writes his own article that tracks back to mine—I would like to give him some of my PageRank goodness, but now I can't. You're all thrown into the "spammer scum" box, like it or not.
Also, having the nofollow plug-in as an add-on is like Microsoft solving security problems with a system patch: It only works if every single person installs it. Three months after nofollow was announced, a statistically significant percentage of MT, WordPress, and other self-hosted weblogs still don't support nofollow. Unfortunately, it really is an all-or-nothing situation, too, because, as we've learned in the last few years, spammers are happy to send out a million messages for a handful of positive responses or, in this case, to add bogus comments to thousands of weblogs for one or two non-nofollow links that the search engine spiders will find.
Nonetheless, it's clear that something has to be done about blogspam, and I applaud the search engines and weblog teams for working together to at least make some progress in this direction, however suboptimal it may be.
Dave Taylor has been writing about business and technology for years and is the author of the upcoming book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Growing Your Business with Google. He maintains a number of weblogs, including Ask Dave Taylor's Tech Support, The Intuitive Life Business Blog, and The Attachment Parenting Blog.