The wild debate about Google's increasingly hardline stance against paid links looks like Wimbledon, with Matt Cutts taking on Rich Skrenta, while Danny Sullivan volleys against Michael Gray.
Rich Skrenta posted his stream-of-consciousness thoughts about the paid link debate. He said "PageRank wrecked the web," a reference to part of Google's model of weighting search results based on inbound links.
"Links used to be for human navigation," said Skrenta. "Google made them count for money and they're ruined now. Nofollow isn't going to put it back the way it was."
Cutts answered from the comments, defending Google's position:I truly believe any successful system (be it eBay, Amazon, Usenet, Wikipedia, DMOZ, or government spending) will attract people who try to optimize for that system or even game it. When Google came onto the scene with its new way of ranking search results in 1999/2000, it was inevitable that people would try to optimize for Google and link-based reputation. Tools like rel=nofollow give site owners a method to decide whether to flow PageRank at a link-level of granularity.Over on
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