The "No Follow" attribute Can Cause Bad Blood and Mistrust

[mandy]

The Nofollow attribute indicates if the source of the link “trusts” the destination of it. Trust is a very critical element in human relations and not one of the easiest...

The reason for somebody who uses “nofollow” intentionally for a specific link might not be “mistrust” of the site the link points to, but rather “not complete trust”.

Unfortunately is there no way to indicate in shades of grey how much somebody trusts somebody else. The nofollow attribute is black and white, absolute, yes or no and that does not reflect real live situations at all...

full article: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=4391#more-4391

[mandy]

Another article on the "nofollow" debate:

Here are 13 reasons why NoFollow is a failure.

1. NoFollow = NoWorky. Using NoFollow in blog comments, the original intent of the tag, does nothing to discourage comment spammers. Using other anti-spamming tools such as question, math and plugins such as Akismet and SpamKarma for Wordpress is much more effective.

2. If a blogger moderates comments, there is no need for a NoFollow attribute. “Everyone who passes a human inspection should get the link love.”

3. Since the use of NoFollow in comments on Wordpress blogs is default, many bloggers do not even realize they are using NoFollow...

full article: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=4410

[mandy]

An opposing viewpoint:

NoFollow has SOME value

Point 4:

“Why use NoFollow on sites, text ads, and blogs if there is no value in terms of search engine indexing?”

Once again, something Google has provided webmasters as a tool to let them help Google in keeping the search index spam-free. Yes, there are better anti-spam tools available, but in cases where you cannot manually moderate each comment or each link, NoFollow offers you a quick-n-dirty solution to keep Google clean.

full article: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=4416#more-4416

[BellisimaJ.]

The no-follow attribute also has other useful purposes.

[mandy]

Related:

Flickr, once a popular source of dofollow links for SEOs has recently turned its links to nofollow automatically! Whereas you could link to your site(s) before and pass juice, now external links are nofollowed. This raises important issues:

1) Is this the future of UGC? Contribute, but don't expect any search ranking benefit? ...

full article: http://sphinn.com/story/30026