To reduce the incentive for comment and other link spammers to leave links to their sites in innocent people’s web presences, Google has recently introduced support for a rel=”nofollow” attribute (quickly followed by Yahoo and MSN). I don’t care enough about this to write a long essay describing why I believe this is a dumb idea, but fortunately Ben Hammersley has already written up everything I would have said. And much more eloquently than I could have done, too.