The never-ending nofollow debate

We seem to be going over, and over, and over, again the debate about nofollow. I thought it would be worthwhile to include here a couple of comments that I made on other blogs.

This is what I posted in response to Loren’s post that sparked off this round of the debate.

Great linkbait Loren! I agree with much of what you’re saying. While comment spam was the original problem that nofollow was supposed to solve, I think that the greater concept is still applicable. Yes, it’s a bandaid that’s imposed by the search engines to make their jobs easier. But, I do see the usefulness of it. If you (or any webmaster) do not have good editorial control over what links are placed on your website, nofollow is a good tool to let the search engines know that you cannot vouch for the quality of the links. If you, or Wikipedia, can take the time to give editorial review to all links posted, then of course the nofollow is irrelevant. I think a lot of people have perverted the meaning of it, though. But, that shouldn’t surprise anyone.
I posted the following on Scobleizer;

I think a lot of people are missing the main point of the nofollow tag. Naturally SEOs will be opposed to it, because they get no juice when they put their links in the comments on your blog. But, preventing people from manipulating search rankings by posting irrelevant links all over the place is the whole reason nofollow was created. It doesn’t matter if it’s link spamming on Wikipedia, or comment spam on Scobleizer. If Loren, you, or Wikipedia feel that they have control over the quality of the links being posted, then of course there is no need for the nofollow. When you remove the nofollow, you’re telling the search engines that you’re vouching for the quality of the links being posted on your website.

And this on Marketing Pilgrim in response to his speculation whether it will increase comment spam or the quality of comments.

I wouldn’t think it would increase the spam comments so much as lowering the general quality. You’d probably see more people posting a short, useless comment like “I agree” or “good post”. I see it a lot in the forums, where people post crap posts just to get their signature into the thread. Not that it doesn’t happen in blogs, but I’d think it would tend to increase when people think they might be getting some juice from the links…..if anyone is going to be removing the nofollow from comments, they’re in effect saying that they’re going to be taking each comment on a case by case basis to ensure that the site being linked to is of quality. IMO, that’s the purpose of the nofollow, if it’s a link that hasn’t passed editorial control. If the blog’s owner is going to check and vouch for each of them, then yea the nofollow doesn’t need to be used.

Also, reference to this post at the “Official Google Blog” from a couple years back.