The nofollow link tag

Comment spam has gotten so bad the search engines had to devise a new tag to combat the problem. Comment spam is a problem for blogs where spammers comment on your blog with linked comments like "Great site, visit my site"  They hope to steal some page rank, in the form of this link, from your site. This post is achieved en-mass by automated programs that search for blogs and automatically post to these sites. Here's some Google reasoning for this new tag.

If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.

With the new nofollow tag your links can be tagged so search engine spiders won't follow the link thus giving no "page rank" love to the destination. This opens a new way for link partners to negate the intended benefits of your linking efforts. I wish everyone were strait-up honest in their dealings but this one of those things that brings with it a whole new basket ways to abuse the system.