I don’t know what all the fuss over googles new rel="nofollow" has been, but Ben Hammeresly does a good job at bunking it:
There’s no incentive for me to spam those sites for the sake of getting Pagerank, that is true, but there’s even less incentive for me not*to. Why would I bother even testing the site for rel=”nofollow”? I might as well just hit it and leave. It’s less work for me, for exactly the same gain (some) and exactly the same loss (none).
All it does is shift the problem from the high pagerank blogs we here might have, with rel=”nofollow”, custom sanitize settings, and mt-blacklist in full effect, all the way over to the less technically adept. And that is one enormous customer service problem heading towards Blogger, 6A and the rest.
Technorati will have to choose if it’s a site that measures raw interconnectivity, or some curious High School metric of look-at-that-person-but-don’t-pay-her-any-attention that the selective use of the rel=”nofollow” attribute will produce. For many purposes, this would mean the results are totally debased and close to useless.
The web has always been build on links – and yes, when it was build there wasn’t this marauding problem of comment spam, referrer spam, and really, there wasn’t spam at all – but I don’t think that the solution to spam is to fundamentally corrupt what has become the primary presence of the web – the interconnection and relation between various nodes in the larger network.
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