Questions Questions - rel="nofollow"

If Google is trying its best for webmaster not to manipulate search engine results why did they expose a way of doing it with rel="nofollow"?

Google's technology lays in the very basis of link popularity, why did they release a way of semi killing this even for legitimate links?

Something tells me there is something very fishy about this.. Google needs to get there act together, I've read countless claims of people moving to yahoo searching because they are getting better results. This sandbox has also caused many serious problems to especially legitimate webmaster.. Even the solo singer Gwen Stefani www.gwenstefani.com

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=Gwen+Stefani&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&p=Gwen+Stefani

Also there are now claims circulating that Google-adwords boosting your place in the serps with evidence.

Game over for Google... Game over.

You shouldn't talk about things you know nothing about.

rel=nofollow was created to help combat SPAMMERS from spamming blogs and forums, and it work's great. This little tag is a blessing for me as my forum has been getting spammed 5-10 times a day, i no longer have to worry about getting penalized for some jackass spamming porn and gambling links all over it before i can get it removed.

Google doesn't make anybody use their search engine, so if you don't like it quit whining and use something else.

First, the "rel=nofollow" attribute is not a Google-specific tool. It is (or will be) used by other search engines, starting from MSN and Yahoo.

So, even if the "nofollow" usage could negatively affect the SERPs, its results would be visible not only on Google but also on other search engines.

Now, it is clear to me that one of the following two things are occurring: 1) dozen of engineers have spontaneously decided to create and use a tool that will negatively affect the quality of search results or 2) they have deeply analyzed the future implications of "nofollow" and thay have implemented this tool in a way that will produce positive effects.

I think that engineers are paid by Google, Yahoo! and MSN to project algorithms that actually work. If webmasters and SEO cannot imagine how these algorithms work, this does not mean that they don't (or will not) work well.

Also, please note that many link popularity algorithms do not rely just on site/page-specific linkage but they analyze large zone of the interlinked web to calculate "weights" and "attributes" for entire zones, not for single web sites.

There are ways to implement the "rel=nofollow" without invalidating the results of web mapping algorithms.