Just received an email from Matt Cutts from Google in response to my email and blog posts No Google juice for nofollow… and Treating all commenters like spammers is a slippery slope regarding the rel=”nofollow” inside A HREF tag. With his permission I’m reprinting his response verbatim below:

Hi, sorry for the delay in replying; I wanted to write back myself, and it’s taking me a little while to dig out from the emails we got. I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve been asking folks to move in that direction (untrusted people get nofollow, but anyone who is trusted or authenticated via something like a captcha gets full credit for their links). I think LiveJournal has already implemented this philosophy, and I’d expect many other software makers to do something like this.

Nofollow needs to be on by default for the lazy folks, but there also needs to be as many ways as possible for trusted users to get full credit for links (whitelists, registered users, authentication, etc.).

Best wishes!

Matt Cutts

Perhaps Scoble can get with Mike Torres at MSN Spaces and pass this info along. After Mike thanked me for my comments he never really provided any answer as to whether or not MSN Spaces would make nofollow an option. I’m far and away not the only blog owner with this concern. Oh, and Matt had a nice P.S too:

P.S. I really enjoyed your blog posts. We’re definitely not claiming that this will solve comment spam completely. I do think that this is a good step though, and will eventually give site owners a lot more flexibility when they want to link to a site but abstain from voting for it.

I continue to feel that making this an option in the blog hosted and blog software arena (wake up Typepad, MSN Spaces) is an important move. Down with the bad guys, yes, but let’s be sure not to punish the good guys in the process. It is nice to know that Googles feels the same way.

• Retraction: MSN Spaces not enforcing nofollow on all blog authors
• No Google juice for nofollow attribute, will this negatively impact legitimate comment activity?
• Pivot blog system makes rel=nofollow an OPTION
• Treating all commenters like spammers is a slippery slope
• MSN Spaces 35 million users now have global content policy
• 10 MB MSN Spaces limit only for photos