I can see your point, so what if I left a comment here — the keyword ‘maxpower’ doesn’t need a SERP boost (or perhaps even deserve one) because I made a comment on this blog. I agree, so what? But what if I left a comment on your blog, as I do now, that mentions that there is a great resource called NoNofollow and it’s all about NoFollow, a subject discussed most prominently on this very page. I think its not only very informative, but also highly relevant to this discussion. Doesn’t that page deserve some pagerank love (a term created to explain the complex calculation that is pagerank and not out of ignorance — as in missing some kind of undefined picture) because it’s mentioned on a page all about NoFollow?

But, because this is a blog and not another kind of website — it gets no boost as NoFollow is applied by default. That doesn’t seem right.

“…it’s [pagerank] now only controllable by the actual author of a blog, not by any random person who happens to leave a comment.”

I have a blog and I control everything. Every detail. I decide (as you do) what comments get (or stay) published, what those comments say, and where they link to. My blog is not a democracy. Therefore, I argue that to claim that “any random person who happens to leave a comment” is somehow usurping your position and taking pagerank (or using pagerank without your permission) is false. A blog owner controls all facets of their online website including other people’s comments — that makes him/ her responsible for those comments. NoFollow robs blog owners of this responsibility.

The basic premise of your argument (if I may, and I could be wrong) is that nofollow is a good way of linking to stuff your site doesn’t want to be associated with, negates comment spam, and therefore it is good.

Akismet provides some spam statistics. These stats show that spam is increasing. Spam hasn’t dropped since nofollow was introduced, so the only good use for nofollow is its use to link to undesirable or unreviewed (by webmasters) websites. In your mind does this lone good use make it a good idea to apply nofollow to all blogs? In mine, it does not.

As I have argued ad nauseum, it is plainly obvious that nofollow was never intended to stop comment spam; it was intended to negate comment spam’s effect on SERPs.

Finally, when I hear people say things like “pagerank love” it makes me think that perhaps they are missing the big picture. PageRank isn’t some kind of “warm fuzzy” that bloggers are supposed to bestow upon each other; it’s simply one component of one company’s proprietary search and retrieval technology. These things change all the time — nofollow was just one of the more public changes. I bet the PageRank calculations two years from now will be very different from two years ago.

I like the idea of “contrib” or similar, it adds symantic value to the relationship, rather than creating an instruction for search engines.