Search Engines, Bloggers Team to Fight Spam Matt Hicks, eWEEK

Google Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division and Six Apart Ltd. are announcing that they are supporting a tag called "nofollow" for excluding blog comments from search-engine crawlers and to prevent spam posts from influencing search rankings. The companies are expected to post formal announcements and more details on their blogs. A Yahoo spokeswoman also said Yahoo Search will support the technique within its search index in the coming weeks. The "nofollow" tag is already a part of the HTML standard, but now blogs will be able to add it to their Web site code and URL string to block crawling of spam comments, said Justin Osmer, an MSN product manager.