Admin Aaron, I don't take anything on the Internet personally so don't
worry about offending me. I am not lashing out at Google. I think
discussions can help make a better engine. Maybe I was a bit snarky in
my reply but I still think there is some validity to it. I tend to
agree with most of your points on the surface and I do appreciate Matt
and other Googlers coming here to answer some of the more vexing
questions. IMO the problem is that Google is relying on webmasters to
patch a flaw in their algorithm and their choice to provide the silly
green PR bar. Because they rely so heavily on links many webmasters
are taking advantage. Instead of figuring out a way to take care of it
internally they are now asking webmasters to change their sites to fix
it for them. Of course, the webmasters that follow SEO are going to do
this but those who simply build sites for their users do not know
about nofollow and they are the ones who could end up getting slapped.
The green PR bar has fueled the link scheme industry and nofollow is
helping some crafty webmasters abuse it even more. I still like Google
and think they offer the best results and excellent feedback but I
believe they deserve some criticism for helping create the link spam
beast. The fact is they have lost control of it and need to figure out
a way to reign it in and IMO nofollow is not the solution. It is
creating more ways to manipulate page rank and while it may be
acceptable for internal pages I think it can be abused as a way to
manipulate search engine rankings.
You make some good points and I generally don't "whine" about many
things but I do have a problem with the whole links/nofollow issue and
I am going to express my opinion.

On Oct 10, 8:45 am, silverstall wrote: