- Search Engines are supposed to be analyzing the web, figuring out whats important. They have the incentive to do this well. The websites they are analyzing do not. Websites have an incentive to nofollow everything. They might be worried about their own rankings, but why should they care about the sites they link to. Nofollow is safe and harmless. No-nofolow should get you in trouble. what does a site gain from not using nofollow links on everything?
- To enforce nofollow rules, Google are supposedly disciplining sites by hurting their organic rankings. But a page with nofollow links appears exactly the same to a user. It's just as right an answer as it was before. Is Google lowering the quality of its results to police the web?
- If Google are able to detect "link farms" and user generated content that should have been nofollow-ed, why don't they just treat those links as nofollow and ignore them. Use this detection to analyze the web, not police it.
- Are they ignoring important information sources? A huge, information rich portion of the web is user generated. Eg wikipedia & stackoverflow. How can Google really be ignoring these links here as data sources? The links on a wikipedia page for example, are very informative. If some webpage is mentioned frequently in stackoverflow questions and answers, it's probably important and its probably a good answer to a lot of questions people are asking google.