encyclo - 1:47 am on Jan 19, 2005 (gmt 0)

I do like Jake's insightful analysis of the situation. I'm not expert enough to think of good ways to abuse the attribute, but as Brett says, the biggest trouble is that Google and the others are admitting that their algos are broken and they need such an attribute.

Clearly, this system is going live by default in many major blogging applications: in future versions and updates of downloadable products such as Movable Type or WordPress, and inserted automatically into hosted solutions such as MSN Spaces and TypePad. But after that, it may very well spread into general CMSs, wikis, forums...

What will the SEs do then? Great swathes of nofollow links produced by default by a thousand CMSs. If they truly respect it and don't follow the link at all, then spidering will be severely hampered. If they follow the link but diminish its value in terms of PR or other such considerations, then PR no longer becomes a mathematical calculation, but rather something which can be controlled (and therefore manipulated) by webmasters.

This attribute breaks the web, because it breaks the value of links.

<added>From the Google Blog announcement (now live):

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.

Also:

Q: Is this a blog-only change? A: No. We think any piece of software that allows others to add links to an author's site (including guestbooks, visitor stats, or referrer lists) can use this attribute.

</added>