signor_john - 8:16 pm on Jun 13, 2009 (gmt 0)

It's worth noting that the nofollow attribute isn't exclusive to Google. It's used by all three of the major search engines, and it was created in response to a real problem: the proliferation of link spam in blog comments, user-editable encyclopedia entries, etc. If such spam didn't exist, the search engines wouldn't see a need for the nofollow attribute. But it does, and they do.