Gives me a chuckle and plenty of opportunity for writing new posts on just how obviously stupid the entire notion really is.

Again, I am not prescribing this as something that is utterly important for all websites, or even for a majority of websites, I am discussing it only on a theoretical level.

Another thing, I think that everyone would be much better off if this discussion was limited to mentioning Rand only for the quoting purposes. Otherwise, it could be perceived (IMHO) that one of the purposes of the [i]ad hominem[/i] arguments are taking a shot at the big dog…

And you really should try herding microbes. It actually works wonderfully. You can order them into tiny spots on a plate, when each spot represents a different population of microbes, according to the gene you have inserted into a plasmid that they received. Pretty easy to do, once you get a gist of it…

I’m wondering how long it will take before we have nofollow penalties …

But to be honest, nofollow should completely be dropped by Google. It’s not normal that 1 (!) search engine decides how websites need to be builded.

Especially not if you have to use it to help ‘big billion Google’ to make their SERP’s.
Crawl, calculate and make the rankings. That’s what they have to do, not saying how websites need to be builded to rank in their search engine.

Michael: If you’re referring to the Google Toolbar PR values (which most people in the SEO community equate with a putative logarithmic equation), Googlers have already told us that by the time the PR data is published it’s out-of-date. Unless one uses a very broad, flexible, and unrealistic definition for “accurate”, I don’t see how one can say we have any accurate information to work with.

If you’re referring to something else, it will help me if you’re a little more specific. I admit to being entirely ignorant about any other published PageRank data (except for the valuations that have been shared through the Google Directory — but I believe someone recently reported those valuations were modified to conform to the Toolbar’s reported data).

There really is no way to determine which pages have PageRank, what the PageRank is, and which links are passing PageRank. You can sort of guess — based on crawl rates and the passing of anchor text — which pages probably have some decent PageRank, but how do you reliably quantify that information?

The use of neutered links is old-school. Why are people switching to nofollow? Probably laziness, it takes less time than javascripting. Or maybe they just spontaneously forgot the other technology options to make the major search bots turn a blind eye.

You use the example of changing 6 links to 5 links being a minimal, that is probably not the case (5 way redistribution of 17% of total value). The redistribution at small numbers is likely far greater than most nofollow schemes are working with, since they are usually nofollowing about 12 links on pages that have between 75-200 links. For example Zappos nofollows 39 out of 193 links on their homepage (~20%). So Zappos is redistributing 20% of their total value across 154 links. And as you point out total value is an unknown.

You did make your point crystal clear. Even me, a Mexican with English as a second language understood your point.

I think that what happens here, it´s that several guys in SEO think that Rand´s assumptions and comments (specially when Rand makes a refference to Matt Cutts) are “All-Mighty” Trues and Facts. However, this cannot be more far from true.

This morning, when I red Rand´s Post about this subject (Seven Short SEO Scribbles), to be honest I was kind of confused, and I thought I misunderstood Rand´s point, maybe because of my poor English, so I had to re-read it twice and more carefully. But, it didn´t make any sense to me that a page with X number of followable links and Y number of nofollow links, will pass more Link-Juice (PR) to those followable links.

Michael, thank you for making a clarification about this issue.

By the way, You made me laugh with this “You might as well try herding Microbes.”

Saludos.