Fie on comment spam

We've installed a software patch for our Movable Type blogware that supports Google's new initiative to combat comment spam.

Gaming the No. 1 search engine's page-ranking algorithms has been a key objective of comment spammers. Google is trying to thwart them by giving Web sites a way to mark hyperlinks so they won't be indexed:

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.

Several leading blogware companies are backing Google's plan, as are rival search engines MSN Search and Yahoo.

On a somewhat related note, Salon today offers a very critical look at what Microsoft is doing to fight spam of the e-mail variety. The answer, apparently, is not enough.