Fighting spammy comments can be a big hassle, but its important not to harm your blog in your attempt to block the spam.
Installing Meta Tags in the header of your blog that block Search Engine robots from following hyperlinks on your blog, decreases the value your blog can provide to partner websites, blogs, companies that you like and Advertisers.
The Header Situation
The nofollow tag in the header is very different in scope to the nofollow tags found in blog comments. In the header it warns off robots from following the links on your page to the other webpages. This means that if you have a link on your website and nofollow meta tags in the header, google will not give credit to the destination web page for having the link on your page.
If you exchange reciprocal links with a fellow blogger, and they have nofollow meta tags in the header and you do not, your link will increase the importance of their site, but theirs will not help you.
The Comment Situation
The nofollow tag issue can cause lots of havoc and confusion for bloggers and advertisers alike for obvious reasons.
There are many misconceptions that if a nofollow tag exists anywhere on a source page, such as in the comments, that it degrades the benefit of a reciprocal link. This is not true.
From an advertisers perspective, nofollow tags actually improve the value of an advertising article or press release. If an advertiser receives a write up along with a reciprocal contextual link in that write up, it will not necessarily serve their purpose or benefit the advertiser for that article to be followed by spammy comments, including links to the advertisers competitors or to a site that might be offensive to viewers.
The nofollow tag in the comments doesn't stop all comment spam, but does serve as disincentive for spam from an SEO and article hijacking perspective.
I utilize a meta tag in my blogs to push for the robots to follow tags as opposed to not follow :
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW" />
I'm led to believe that having no Meta tag would work just the same, but sometimes I find it useful to point to this out to my advertiser sponsors. This enables the advertiser to explicity see the value they are receiving from a press release on my website.
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