Bloggers now have a new weapon in their arsenal. The rel="nofollow" attribute for links.

Six Apart has announced in co-operation with Google, Yahoo and MSN Search and many other blog vendors a massive joint anti-spam initiative based on this new attribute.

Six Apart are fully involved in supporting it within their products: Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal.

They’ve already released a simple plugin for Movable Type users that’ll automatically add rel="nofollow" to all URLs entered into trackbacks or comments.

As Neil Turner says:

This is very, very good news. I don’t expect it to entirely defeat comment spam but the spammers are going to have to get very crafty to get around it. That said, it’s only effective if everyone implements it and gives the spammers nowhere to hide.

I agree with that. I’ve implemented it on my blog, and I’ve been using Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist plugin for a few months now, so spammers beware. There’s nothing for you here, please move along quietly.