The use of nofollow makes the search engines a sort of “super user”. A super user that I tell my business relationships to while hiding that information from my regular users. That special treatment does a disservice to real users, theinternet in general, and the search engines.

How does it do all that harm? It means that I am treating real users as second class citizens that are not privy to the knowledge I share with you, the search engine. The internet is harmed because it generates a notion of “better safe than sorry” causing people to stop linking in a normal and healthy ways. Lastly it harms engines in two ways. First by eroding our trust in Google after repeated threats of “use it or no PR passing”. Second by corrupting the data in the index with input from users who don’t understand how to use it and the change in linking patterns of those users due to the effects of nofollows existence.

I will not let a search engine impose itself as a super user on my sites. Search engines are simply a users nothing more and I decide what my users get and don’t get. We willingly share so much data with you already Matt, the nofollow bit is just going to far. I request that Google stop pushing its nofollow agenda and we all move on to more productive things.

I sent an email asking about your post to the Video team about 11 p.m. last night (I was catching up on email), and the Video team had a changelist to fix it ready by this morning. The change will go out in the normal course of pushing out a new binary program, which should be within about week. The Video team offered to do an off-cycle/emergency push of the binary to fix this in a faster-than-a-week time frame, but my thinking was that as long as the change happened to fix the bug within a few days, it would be fine to stay with the normal push schedule.

P.S. Thanks for pointing this out. I’m leaving my email in the contact field if you want to follow up. If you want to get me some contact info, I can also ask Adam Lasnik to send some schwag to say thanks for noticing this and bringing it to our attention.

The problem is in the existance of nofollow. It pressumes that its anyones business but the webmasters as to why they linked to a site.