that something is lost on the web when some links are in essence devalued compared to others. In his article in Searchblog, Follow On No Follow: Will “Fully web-expressed writing” Suffer? he suggests that commenting itself will suffer in a nofollow world, in that commenters will be less motivated to engage in, as he puts it, “fully web-expressed writing.”
I think he has a point, but then again it’s hard to say. There are a ton of assumptions flying around about blog comments and their value, the motivations of commenters, the motivations of comment spammers, the relative value of links in body text vs links in comments, etc. But very few of the assumptions have been checked and validated in any way. I like that there are opinions on this, and strong opinions. The trouble is, everyone’s opinions are based on slightly different assumptions – and no one can support those assumptions.
