Why did Google change its ‘nofollow’ treatment?
What used to be a way to keep page rank (how important Google thinks your site is) from draining to the sites that you link to, appears to no longer work the same way as when it was announced in 2005.
This has apparently been in effect for some time, but has only come to light in the last few months. While I can see the benefit of the ‘nofollow’ tag for limiting the benefit of spam posts to blogs, I can only guess that this will increase the amount of spam links to sites. It also has the effect of making ‘page rank sculpting’ a thing of the past. I suspect that this might be a good thing in that its tough to justify the cost and effort of that technique. In the end… content is king and that’s the best bang for the buck focus for websites.
My tin foil hat theory is that if spammers are posting links to sites, then those sites are paying advertisers and Google caters to paying advertisers.