Movable Type 'nofollow' plugin

Today we are pleased to announce our full support for the rel="nofollow" attribute to hyperlinks introduced to address the main cause of weblog spam: the payoff of higher placement in search engine results.

This initiative, with announced support from Google, Yahoo, MSN (and surely more to come), will direct search engines to ignore links with this attribute set for the purposes of spidering or increasing search engine relevance or ranking.

For current users of Movable Type (note: this plugin is included by default starting with version 3.16), this support is implemented as a simple plugin (zip [4K], tar/gzip [3K]-- tested on MT 3.x and MT 2.661). For most users enabling "nofollow" support involves placing a single file in your plugins directory. All links submitted by external users in comments and TrackBacks will then be modifed to add the rel="nofollow" attribute.

If you're interested in specific details of its operation and the effect it has on Movable Type template tags, see our overview entitled "Introduction to nofollow" on the Professional Network weblog. For an overview of our support across all Six Apart platforms, please see Ben's "Support for nofollow" post on Six Log.

Also, in case you missed it, you should check out the "Movable Type Guide for Fighting Comment Spam" we published a week and a half ago but may have gotten drowned out by other matters.