Also shouldn’t Yahoo! implement nofollow on links in their paid dirrectory?

It definetely makes things uneven for little guy like myself.

I perfectly understand PageRank and what it does and what not.

I also see the more and more reduced importance of PageRank in Google’s ranking algorithm for their search results and understand why that is.

From your comments can I see that we seem to agree on what PR is and what not. I also seem to read between the line that you also believe that PageRank is flawed. It was much better than what we had before, no doubt about that, but it is also far from perfect. Correct me, if I read that wrong.

Wouldn’t you agree that replacing PR with something that considers at least intent and may be even relevance to some degree would be a major leap forward in search?

It would also make the stupid PageRank Bar in users browsers to what it actually is, obsolete.

PageRank isn’t about relevance at all. It’s about the likelihood (probability) that you’ll find a given page by randomly clicking on links, regarless of any page’s content.

PageRank is not about searching through search engines.

PageRank is not about topic, category, or intent. It’s solely and strictly an arbitrary (and extremely naive and misguided) measurement of relative value or importance within a community of documents.

The SEO community has struggled to understand PageRank for years, and this lack of understanding has held back SEOs in so many ways.

And a negative but unpaid or refunded review should not have a nofollow? How are the two different from a relevance perspective?

The paid, but negative review is actually more relevant, because almost everybody starts with a much stronger opinion about the item to review if being paid, actually less the being paid part than the fact that you are offered compensation which is flattery and a compliment to your competence an/or influence and reach. And who is not more friendly towards somebody who introduces himself by making a compliment about you or what you do.

If the review is still negative, then the flaws must be more severe, because all the positive attitude towards the product or service does not make the flaw seem negligible.

I would in most cases offer the advertiser not to publish the review and provide him with the reasons why the review would be negative and make suggestions about how to improve on that.

That is consulting and the compensation for the review should cover that, so no refunds necessary.

PageRank is not about relevance regarding a users search (the intend, subject, search phrase) which is a weakness. It boosts the ranking of a page for the relevant positive terms and negative terms alike.

Results would be more realistic and better, if there are different forms of PageRank with each being applied depending on the users intend.

It’s much more complicate that the current way search engines rank, but it reflects much more how things are done in the real world.

A service could end up not ranking at all for the phrase “buy service xyz” but rank high for “issues with service xyz” if a lot of people write negative about it (service would be in this case something general like “search engine optimization” and not a brand name).

Nofollow is only for one side of the spectrum and there is no counterpart for the other. This causes an artificial shift towards one side which is not reflecting the actual reality. There is no black and white in my world. It’s shades of gray, always and without exceptions.

Here is something that noone has really pointed out yet, but I am sure many thoughtful people realise.

By introducing FUD, only a small amount of people have to start using nofollow within the content for it to be an immediate flag on all the other links in the previous month to the same site.

I also wonder whether Google might sometimes just use RSS feeds instead of pages for a lot of their indexing. Whilst on a blog page there are frequently nofollow links, in a feed there are not.

There are ways to keep links outside the RSS feed but have them appear on the page.

This might be true for the majority of links but can not be automatically assumed for any link….”

This was never true for the majority of links. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin concluded that citation-based analysis of linkage was a valid means of determining value on the Web, they were just tossing out another crackpot theory that flew in the face of reality.

Today, things are pretty much the same. Google’s PageRank strategy has always been a crackpot theory and always will be a crackpot theory.

But through their growing filtration technology, Google is bringing some semblance of sanity to the veneer of PageRank that actually is incorporated into their search results calculations.

“Rel=’nofollow’” is just a part of Google’s filtering scheme. It won’t help the Web sites that are subjected to link spamming because link spamming has always encompassed more goals than just manipulating search results.

Google has yet to acknowledge that it’s not all about Google.

Google will not outright sell search rankings. This is good. Similarly, people shouldn’t be able to buy search rankings through traffic brokers (i.e. webmasters). This way, a company can dump loads of cash into advertising (re links), and automatically get a high search ranking. That would result in cruddy search results.

Because the web emphasizes free information, it is a much more democratic space than most. Consequently, search ranking should be based on meritocracy. This is why paid search results are differentiated from the rest.

I think that the nofollow tag is great innovation that’s well overdue. Furthermore, I think that the backlash against it is just a lot of people who are really good at what they do being scared over the changing marketplace.

But good SEOs are good because they are smart. They’ve thrived under this relatively merit-based space, and I have now doubt that we’ll all adapt.

I say that we shouldn’t make the same mistake as the tertiary publishing industry. We should be forward thinking, and instead of moaning over the change and trying to get some much bigger than us to meet us half way (like magazine charged for online subscriptions), we should be forward thinking. We need to be focusing on innovations that can help us adapt to the new order, because the old one is not only on the way out, but it makes sense that it is.