I think MT did a good thing in making the rel=nofollow attribute a plugin instead of a part of their core code - at least for now. Sites that receive a lot of blogspam either from linkbacks or comments can certainly use this - and it makes it useful. But thinking about the other side of the street - people who participate in your community should get some benefit from participating. If there isn't a problem with your user community putting up links to bad sites left and right, it should be OK if you miss the occasional link that should be deleted. Just My Opinion. I just fear that if everybody puts up "rel=nofollow" all over the place then we're going to get to the point that it ends up being a useless tag. If it is used responsibly, then it can dramatically cut down on spam.
well said. Sometimes me indecisiveness to post is just pushed over the edge by the thought, well, I'll get to express my opinion, and get a tiny backlink while I'm at it.
I wonder - is this valid HTML? if you implement this thing, does it mean that you have to be running XHTML? It's not like they (W3) would go back and update all existing standards to deal with this. I searched w3.org and got this: Your search - rel=nofollow - did not match any documents.
rel is a standard attribute for HTML links: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#adef-rel nofollow is a new value for the attribute. This is in accordance with the standard which allows for new values to be defined. rel="nofollow" should validate.
You can impliment it using valid XHTML yes. You can make your own rel=anything and it can be valid, providing you follow the rest of the xhtml standards.
Interesting... It looks like it is valid HTML 4.0 with a bit of a caveat (at least as I understand it from reading. I didn't read the whole thing... too much for my brain for now, but it looks like you have to put a reference to your metadata profile if you use a non-standard link tag. Something like: <HEAD profile="http://www.acme.com/profiles/core"> PHP: I haven't seen anything from google about them publishing a profile. It could be that it is valid XHTML. I put a link on an xhtml page and it validated fine. I don't have any 4.0 spec pages to validate. I also noticed that there is a draft spec for this here: http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/RelNoFollow (this link I found on google's blog). i'm not the only one who has a problem with this apparently. I followed the w3 link and clicked on "link-types" right after "rel =" Here is the relevant information, which I had to get from a few different pages: