12 Reasons against nofollow

As featured on NoNoFollow.net, a new discussion has centered on the recent matter events caused by Google’s plan to implement the method of filtering links for their pagerank and searchindex systems.

As the argument rel=“nofollow“ will only restrict the robots to continously follow links, any blog can contain further spam as the filtering for spam can only be implemented in the blog software manually, via a plugin or directly on the side of the blog service provider. Almost too easy, an automatically created link can be formatted with the nofollow argument. This can be done secretly in any message system or bullitin board software without noticing the users. It may be used to restrict the number of links within html pages and might affect the pagerank of your own website if you use generic tools like this blogsoftware. On top of this, a human being will not be interested in the differences of normal links and the nofollow links as human beings are usually able to determine whether the link leads towards relevant content or spam.
The whole argument causes the filtering of link, the discrimination of users, changing the idea of the web, the discrimination of weblogs, the dissemination of free speech – all of this is based on the development by only search engine companies and not the W3C (World-Wide-Web Consortium) who should be responsible and decidable in concern of these matters.