In the continuing fight against comment/trackback spam, Aaron Wormus has a new posting concering the official announcement from Google (and a few others) about their support for the new "rel=nofollow standard".

After a bit a couple rumours banging around google finally annouced the decision to fight blog comment spam by ignoring links that had the "rel=nofollow" attribute.

Livejournal, Movable Type, Blogger, Wordpress, and wikipedia were among som leading blog software creators and community sites which quickly gave their support to the initiative. Serendipity developers created a plugin to allow the blog owners to implement this functionality, but issued an open statement to Google in opposition of the new "standard".

Personally, I think that any kind of "standard" that's put out there like this helps, but isn't a solution for the issue. Granted, it will keep the links from being registered as valid, but they doesn't meant they will stop showing up. For more info on this new "standard" and what it can and cannot do, see the site started for it - NoNoFollow.net.