The world is waiting for my thoughts on the nofollow tag the new google thing to allow it to be told when links should not be considered in page rank.
The idea is that links in comments can be tagged as unreliable so google will not consider them in pagerank calculations. Eventually comment spammers will give up putting links in comments and we webmasters won't have to spend our time on captchas, spam filters etc.
I don't like it much, it is a long term strategy that relies on ALL webmasters that allow anonymous or unverified posting to implement it and it stops honest linking in comments.
Commenters on my site are welcome to plug their own site, any spam that gets past my captcha gets deleted from the approval queue anyway.
No, I don't have a better solution to this problem.
The only good use I have found for this new tag is from scoble which is to use it as a way of linking when you don't want to boost the targets page rank.
I can use this.
Here goes, one and one aka 1&1 have caused me big problems and expense and I urge you to go elsewhere.
There, revenge is sweet, best served spitefully.
Peter's Moblog
Another thought on this. Right now the comment spammers are after google pagerank, they want their sites to appear higher up in google results. If they stop getting pagerank boosts, won't they just start advertising their products directly in comments, not worry about google?
Hopefully the number of people reading comments is too small to bother targetting with adverts.
Peter