Nofollow May Be a Rank Solution.
I had no idea how important Google PageRank was to the business world
until I did some PHP/MySQL programming for a local ecommerce retailer.
The boss watched search rankings on product-related keywords for the
company and its competitors on a daily basis, and you could see the
immediate effect on sales of a rank move.
Multiply one small St. Augustine company by one million and you
have a huge worldwide economy, utterly dependent on the vicissitudes of
an algorithm. Google's support for a nofollow attribute throws a wrench into comment and referral spam by adding a huge new concept to the Web: a link of no confidence.
Web publishers can now link to a site without improving its PageRank. Robert Scoble enthusiastically explains one reason that people will do this:
... last year a carpet store in Redmond ripped off a lot of people.
The store is now out of business, but back when it was happening I
wanted to link to the store but couldn't.
Why not?
Because one link from my blog would have automatically put the
store at the top of the search page on Google for "Redmond carpet
store." Why is that? Because of my Page Rank.
This sounds good, though it officially abandons the pretense that
Google's search algorithm is tailored to the linking behavior of Web
users, rather than the other way around.
I read some search engine optimization forums this morning to see how they're responding to the change, figuring that these panicky PageRank Kremlinologists might see the implications beyond weblogging.
One pointed out that the change breaks the first principle of Google's recommendations for webmasters:
"Make pages for users, not for search engines." This may not be a big
deal, because weblogs themselves are one big feedback loop in which
humans and Google conspire to make each other happy. We feed it links
to webloggers and current content; it moves bloggers up the ranks and
feeds us traffic; we become more motivated to publish. do { } while (true).
Wikipedia has the same circular relationship with the one true search engine:
We write a thousand articles; Google spiders them and sends some
traffic to those pages. Some small percentage of that traffic becomes
Wikipedia contributors, increasing our contributor base. The enlarged
contributor base then writes another two thousand articles, which
Google dutifully spiders, and then we receive an even larger influx of
traffic.
Overnight, a handful of weblog companies have implemented a change
that touches the entire Web: How people trade the most valuable unit of
currency in the attention economy, the hyperlink.
Before this change, every outgoing link on a Web page lowered its rank, leading some optimizers to view them as a leak:
Outbound links are a drain on a site's total PageRank. They leak
PageRank. To counter the drain, try to ensure that the links are
reciprocated.
The most far-reaching impact could be from publishers who adopt nofollow
on external links to boost the effect of their internal links, taking a
bajillion rank suggestions right out of Google's algorithm. The subset
of the Web devoted to making as much money as possible, properly
optimized to plug leaks, becomes as searchable as AltaVista in 1997. [Workbench]
11:21:00 AM 
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This
is how Photochoppers rolled in the olden days: Put hood on Atari; take
a screenshot; develop film; paint edits on prints with watercolor;
invent scanning device to transfer image into digital 16 color file
that spanned 200 floppy discs; upload to BBS over 300 baud modem,
giving yourself enough ratio to download ever phreaker howto; bear
witness to the first recorded invocation of the term 'ROFL.'
