Bad Bloggers and the No-Follow command

Ok - so I understand that comment spam is a problem and something must be done about it to keep the blogsphere functional. But here is the deal - why use the "no-follow" command? Are you a minion of Google?

Here are 16 good reasons that Good Blogsphere netizens ought not use the no follow command.

16 Reasons against nofollow

1. nofollow does not prevent comment spam
2. nofollow is semantically incorrect
3. nofollow harms the connections between web sites
4. nofollow is not useful for humans, just for search engines using PageRank or a similar technique
5. nofollow could be used to shut web sites out
6. nofollow discriminates legitimate users as spammers
7. nofollow heists commentators' earned attention
8. nofollow could be used to further discriminate weblogs
9. nofollow prevents the Web from being a web
10. nofollow eliminates the dissemination of free speech
11. nofollow was developed in privacy with only search engines companies taking part in the discussion
12. nofollow allows unethical or ignorant PageRank hoarders to misuse trackbacks
13. nofollow hurts search engines by taking away context
14. nofollow allows sites to sell PageRank
15. nofollow is misnamed to distract from the creator of the link spam problem
16. nofollow encourages unpaid labor to clean up search engine companies databases

No-follow commands on your comments - or worse in blog post - say that you are just too lazy to implement controls to stop spammers. If you are big enough to get a lot of comments then you ought to be able to afford simple software to help you manage comments.

It also says - hey I do not care what the WWW was supposed to be, i.e. a series of links for point to point -information flowing via contextual links-a web! Hyperlinks are important to more than humans, most web traffic has a search query in the mix somewhere. If you take away the search engines ability to index links you are in effect shutting the door on information flow.

Google's index is Google's problem, sure they have great spiders that grab and index everything. If they want to serve good search results it is up to them to figure out how to clean things up. If they fail to do that, some other company will figure it out. That is called the free market. You, my fellow bloggers and webmasters are acting like unpaid employees of the search engines - get a grip, dump the no-follow commands.

Furthermore, no-follow commands in no way reduce link spamming, it has just forced spammers to alter their tactics. They still spam hundreds of comment sites in the hope that somebody will click their link. They have other nefarious ways to get pagerank.

The only people that no-follow links hurts is the little guy blogger. No I take that back, it hurts the blogshere. We want bloggers to comment on other blog sites with intuitive and insightful comments - the reward for reading and leaving comments should be a tiny link back to one's blog (a link seen by humans and search engines).

Shame on you slaves to Google's wishes - don't give me the argument that it is your blog and you will do as you please - you are either a good blogshere netizen or you are not and no-follow is bad behavior.

I love Firefox - it has a nifty little tool that shows me all you nefarious "nofollowers" out there. Shame on you.

Read more if you are not convinced and again here if you are not convinced yet.

Update: Yes I know it makes sense to bring some sanity to search engine results, otherwise you search for failure and get this. Unfettered comment links could lead to googlebombing. But again, that is Google's problem to fix, we bloggers need not destroy our web of connectivity to fix their problems.