Nofollow probably won’t work
As many know, Google announced recently what they claim to be a solution to blog comment spam. Their solution is to allow web authors to take away the PageRank propagation incentive from certain links by adding the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links.
Marcus Baker has an intersting piece detailing why he thinks this initiative won’t work. I agree with him.
But I think it could be worse. In some recent research I did on spam, I found out that email spammers only need a .1 % response rate in order to make money. I have a feeling that the needed success rate may be similarly low for blog and wiki spammers. If so, and the spammers are playing a “percentages game” (which they obviously are), the nofollow thing may even increase blog and wiki spam because spammers will need to have more attempts in order to get the needed conversions.
