Am I missing something or this "nofollow" frenzy will make things even worse?

I was recently checking links to one of my sites, and realized that all of the links that are coming from quality authority websites now have "nofollow" tag. Also, most of the natural links are "nofollow".

So this got me thinking. While Google is trying so hard to fight spam, more and more honest webmasters are starting to use "nofollow" tag, even when linking to extremely quality websites, because they are afraid Google might ban their sites for suspected link selling.

This means that in the future almost all links that pass PR juice will be paid, because those who want to risk not using "nofollow" will only do it for money, but they will do it in much less obvious way. Paid links will be more expensive, but much harder for Google to detect.

So I actually have to start thinking about optimizing my quality website because I can no longer expect "dofollow" natural links. Or am i missing something?? Could this Google's strategy backfire?

 

It's certainly going to make backlinks more difficult to get and that aspect of SEO more difficult. This and other things Google has done could back fire. There are many people online with their own sites and blogs. As Google continues to force them out, they may decide to jump ship and start using Yahoo or another search engine.

 

What if we take it to the extreme? If high authority sites are no-follow and that filters down, eventually all links could be no-follow. Someone could easily feel that if so many sites were deliberately not passing them link juice, why shouldn't they do the same and make all their own outbound links no follow?
The whole strategy of links as votes would then surely collapse?

 

i dont think theres anything to worry about at the moment. especially if its from article directories. dofollow will always be around i believe, having some nofollow links will at least make it look natural to google though and not trying to arbitrage their algorithms

 

i think if nofollow become's a really major 90% of the websites follow trend, then the internet is going to shift more over to social networking before anything else.

 

You pose a good question. And I think google is attempting to place less importance on backlinks and more importance on content. And I strongly suspect that there is value in no follow links. On one of my sites, I picked an interior page and created a small group of backlinks (100 links, all white hat, social media), many were no follow. In the last PR update, the PR of this page jumped to PR3. And it's the ONLY interior page that's above a PR1 or 2. Even though several pages have considerably more and higher quality inbound links.

Now I don't care much about PR. I care about rankings and traffic. But I still found it interesting.