Google today announced plans to block Blog Comment Spam, on the theory that if they don’t give blog spam any visibility, if there is no value in spamming blogs, the practice will stop. Horay for Google!!!

From the GoogleBlog, Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Preventing comment spam
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.

We hope the web software community will quickly adopt this attribute and we’re pleased that a number of blog software makers have already signed on.

We’ve also discussed this issue with colleagues at our fellow search engines and would like to thank MSN Search and Yahoo! for supporting this initiative.