Google gets a lot of praise and a lot of criticism.
They make what they do look easy, and they certainly make searching easy.

Now they’ve come out with a solution to slow down comment spammers. Most comment spammers are looking for google juice - a bump up in their search engine ratings and results.
This hyperlink attribute is designed to change their results, which means the benefit of spamming is diminished.
Whoo hooo!

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.

Many well known blog platform biggies have signed on.
I wonder how long it will take spammers to figure out a work around?
Hopefully long enough for weary bloggers to catch our cyber-breath so to speak.

via Ian’s Messy Desk