Wider App. for Rel Nofollow?

[glengara]

Haven't used it yet as I thought it was specifically for when there was no control over links, but in yesterday's blog entry Matt Cutts comments on how the rel nofollow tag can be used to link to a "disreputable" source without it counting as a vote (or incurring the G displeasure, I'm assuming)

That's good to see, as I've dropped a number of links to "dodgy" sites for safety reasons, so it seems like we're getting close to the point where it can/should be used more widely, for safely interlinking domain networks for example.

[arrowman]

Adding "nofollow" doesn't mean "this link is not part of seo manipulation". It only means "this link is not a vote from this page on that page". An unusual pattern of nowfollows might be seen as a sign of black hat seo.

[glengara]

There's been quite an amount of recent discussion on this in relation to a certain web publisher and their "sponsored links".

Matt Cutts had this to say:

"As others have noted, if you're going to sell text links that pass reputation/PageRank, the way to do it is to add rel=nofollow to those links."

and

"The rel=nofollow attribute is the correct answer: any site can sell links, but a search engine will be able to tell that the source site is not vouching for the destination page."

You can read the discussion here, you'll need to add the http but not the www:

radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/08/search_engine_s_2.html