> Why does a multi-millionaire company get to decide that my HTML markup is `wrong` if there is no "nofollow" in my HTML?

They don't "get to decide" anything. It's just that _you_ don't get to decide either. After all there are many others who also want to be listed at the top for a particular query.

Simply, their algorithm works in a particular way. Other tags might also affect the ranking, such as h1 tags, for example. There has to be _some_ mechanism.

Why is this so difficult to understand?