Forum OpenACS Q&A: The rel attribute (Rel="nofollow")

Are there any plans to implement the rel attribute (Google's take) in OpenACS (possibly in packages), so that people are less likely to leave blog and comment spam?

Setting the attribute rel to "nofollow" in an href tag prevents Google, Yahoo and other search engines from counting links towards PageRank and WebRank. Adding this attribute by default would make blog and comment spam less valuable to those leaving comments. It could possibly used by default for all off-site links.

This kind of relates to a recent thread about Google optimisation. My favourite place to find out about webmaster/content-related topics, including SEO is WebmasterWorld, which include 26 steps to 15k a Day, which is all about building a site using linking and content.

I have been thinking that rel="nofollow" would be quit useful to limit googles (and others) spidering of link based filtering. An example is bug tracker where you have zillions of links which serve up filtered lists of bugs but none of which should be spidered other than the main unfiltered list.

If the sidebar links were rel="nofollow" I suspect it would
decrease the burden imposed by the google spider while at the
same time increase the number of "meat" pages visited.

There are other ways to get this done but that seems to be a good way to do it.

I saw a take on the rel="nofollow" idea a while back that suggested that comment spammers are unlikely to change their practices as a result... comment-spamming is essentially a zero-cost option, so there's no financial/effort incentive for them to stop, and although they won't gain the pagerank mojo that they would have in the past they will still get some number of clickthroughs from the links left in comment spam...

again, this is only relevant to sites that allow anonymous commenting and for which automated comment-leaving scripts exist, so it's not likely to directly affect many (if any) OACS sites, but it's an interesting angle that I haven't seen explored anywhere else...

As always, there's a more complete method that springs to mind one minute after posting (and the code above was mangled):

regsub -nocase -all {href="?'?h[^"' >]+"?'?} $message(content) {& rel="nofollow"} content

set message(content) $content