- Sphinn, it didn’t make it to the home page so I don’t have a feel for the traffic yet.

- Lazy webmaster is a good point. I also personally feel its a matter of responsibility. If you are going to put forth the effort to maintain a site, part of that is being responsible for its content. If the site outgrows your ability to maintain it, then its either time to sell, grow, shut it down. Nofollowing everything is a cop-out, taking the easy way out. That goes for blogs that nofollow all comments as well.

- Flux is kind of what I was getting at as well, by “not influencing” search engines nofollow is in fact influencing them. It’s the missing cause that changes history. What if Einsteins mother would have fallen off a horse and died before he was born? The world would never have known what it is missing. With Nofollow the web is one thing, without its another, to say that it doesn’t influence search engines is wrong. The fact that a popular site like wiki isn’t voting for any other sites on the web is a disservice for all of google’s searchers as the sources for most of their pages don’t get the credit they deserve.

- Using nofollow as a tool is good of course. I nofollow my feeds as well as block them by robots.txt. I look at it like a redirection. If I redirect an old page to a new one, I change my links to the old page to the new one. I don’t want to send the crawlers on a hunt around the site. Well, if I am going to block a page by robots.txt I don’t want to also tell them to crawl it with a link to it.

- I am just wonder if in the future that the over-use of nofollow will be used as a signal of an overly-optimized site. I use it as a signal of quality, just like a site with no external links is a dead end, so should a site with nofollowed all external links be considered a dead end. It’s contrary to the nature of Google’s ranking algo.

Whilst Google are known to twist the spin periodically, I can’t remember any total “about face” movements

Short to mid term, it’s going to cause alot of flux in the index as it comes back to equilibrium, which may look good from the internal models at Google - but medium term, it’s not going to achieve very much at all - it’ll be the same old same old.

But nothing says that Google has to always listen to nofollow - so maybe their idea is to stop obeying it once people learn that comment spam isn’t worth the effort. I think if that ever happened you’d find it would coincide with an announcement that the little green bar was to be deprecated.

Basically in the interim, as you pointed out JLH, if you’re not using nofollow you’re at a disadvantage.

Nofollow always looked like a ‘patch’ rather than a evolutionary step to me, and I think it’s a strategy built on sand.

M

One of my gripes about the nofollow is that it is effectively a form of cloaking: telling the search engines that a link is irrelevant while at the same time making it look like a normal link to the users. Imagine if all the links in the Wikipedia were highlighted as being “potentially untrustable” — would anyone view the Wikipedia as being trustable?