“rel=’nofollow’” doesn’t in any way disclose the reason for a post or link. You cannot show that a nofollowed link was bought, is part of a purchased post, or in any way denotes some sort of disclosure.

What Google needs to do is promote the most relevant content first in its search results and stop favoring link-heavy sites (many of which are autogenerated from databases and packed with AdSense). All PageRank is doing for Google right now is enforcing Google’s policy of Web Apartheid, whereby link-poor sites are relegated to the (now hidden, undisclosed) Supplemental Index.

Google can fix a lot of problems by taking PageRank and anchor text out of the search results rankings.

If they want to use PageRank to determine crawl rates, fine.

The Math Union showed last year that citation analysis (including PageRank) is a complete waste of time and effort that in no way produces any guide to quality or authority.

If Matt wants to keep talking about disclosure, he needs to get Google to start disclosing its Supplemental Results again.

I edited the post correcting the name to Andy Beard NOT Mr. Beal

Ultimately Google might not need links, but they don’t rank for Mobile Phones, or Smartphones – HTC using US geolocation and personalization off from my location in Poland currently ranks 3rd behind Blackberry.

Do you think there is a significant difference between ranking 2nd & 3rd for smartphone in Google? I do