Does that mean Google is banning its own Adwords program them?

pmsl

Nice to see Google admit that PageRank is just a dial, and that they'll turn it up or down as they see fit. I might not like the situation, but at least now they're up front about some animals being more equal than others.

it is not up to google to instruct me to add tags to my links, especially when those tags will not be part of any HTML standard, and are thus going to make pages non-compliant.

Getting more and more like MS everyday

Google only has itself to blame for ever letting page rank be public. It should be ditched from being queryable/viewable by users, even via the toolbar. Less time focused on PR by webmasters and more time focused on producing quality content, instead of the obsession they've bred in Today's webmasters, would really help with Google's almost spam[in]dex at times, albeit not as bad as live.com. (Just take a look around forums.digitalpoint.com to see what I mean... so-called webmasters too busy buying/selling links to work on content.) Good, interesting content is what brings a lot of traffic and returning traffic.

Wow, look at the whiny comments! Their actions seem quite reasonable to me.

If you want to put crap links on your page, and you don't want to disassociate your page from them in some way, it should reflect on your site. What was the problem, again?

So ... don't add that particular Google-ian anchor attribute if you don't want to. No big deal. Your pages will validate without it, and the Big G will treat your site only a little differently from those who want to please Her. You'll still have Yahoo and MSN.

For those who don't yet know, the attribute Google wants us to add to any of our "paid links" (including unpaid-yet-potentially-beneficial-to-the-receiver outgoing links) is this: rel="nofollow", as in <a href="http://notmysite.com" rel="nofollow"...

This simple (and, granted, out-of-the-spec) use of the rel attribute won't hurt you in any way except that you'll get those links flagged in a strict HTML validator. Other search engines won't mind, and Google will reward you by not following those links and thanking you for your effort. Screen readers don't give a darn, and I can't find any application that objects to this, any more than they object to the hundreds of MS-specific tags and attributes that currently clutter up the web.

Google simply wants you to tell them not to associate that link with your page content. "Google: Don't follow this link with your spider." Simple. Don't use it, if you don't want to. Your paid links will still get the exposure and visitor clicks. Done deal.

And it's hardly MS-ian, as their mantra is more like, "Our way or screw you."

Google has about a dollar of my Adsense money. But one of my buddies is owed about $30. How many trillions of dollars does Google have on-account for Adsense advertisers that are under the $100 cheque-issue limit?

I'll post AC since there's been a multicoloured helicopter hovering around here recently.

I suggest you use adverts from Project Wonderful instead.

Of course, the reason the various high-profile sites got their Pagerank dropped was that they used a non-Google Adwords-alike that didn't use rel=nofollow. Be careful.

The tag in question, is really an attribute is (rel="nofollow")

The tag in question does not cause the HTML on your page to become invalid HTML, even according to the anal w3c verifier.

Would you prefer to continue the wild-west search atmosphere. Is it fair and quality to have folks buying their way into natural search?

I've seen Cutts speak in person many times, and he's been preaching this same idea for over 2 years.

Adwords/Adsense links don't pass pagerank, they're called by javascript.