Thank you for illustrating my point! As a reward, I’ll let your comment stay up.

CAM

That said — I just read up on blackhat SEO, and what I learned can be summarized in four words:  “It’s all about automation.”  I don’t agree with your premise that Wikipedia can be expected to have found a better way.

I’m also an editor in the ODP (although I come close to quitting in a rage multiple times per day). There, things are indeed under reasonable control, and giving link love is appropriate. Indeed, given the small number of apparent human visitors — does ANYBODY have DMOZ showing up in their referrer logs? — giving link love is pretty much the ODP’s only current practical raison d’etre. But I don’t see how Wikipedia could avoid taking the step it did.

Wikipedia is too big and too powerful to use a kneejerk reaction like this. They are surely much cleverer than that.

Andy — I don’t see where your patronizing first paragraph undermines what I said. Quite to the contrary; it supports it. Please try again.

Thanks for your comments, guys. CAM

I’m more likely to click a link in a comment or on a username link than I am half the links in an actual article, hence they should count for more in my eyes, because that’s what PR is supposed to represent, the odds of getting there.

nofollow doesn’t stop spam, bad behaviour and akismet do. So I’ll use them.

Most of the spam you see however isn’t for products that most people write about, so it is hard to avoid the filter.

Also not all search engines respect nofollow, thus there has always been some incentive other than readers clicking.

Nofollow has its uses, for at least partially indicating to search engines the value you place on links. I value my readers and commenters and thus they get followable links.