Because a nofollow suggests that you don’t vouch for a site, or that the url was probably placed there by someone attempting to spam your content.
I don’t sell any links, but I probably wouldn’t place a link on one of my sites if I had to say I won’t vouch for it. Yahoo charges $299 to even consider a link. If I were going to sell a link, I wouldn’t accept any link. Ok, well, at 299k, I’d sure get a lot looser.
Really, I’ve always done what Google wanted because I need the traffic, but I think they are going overboard when they’re trying to create their own standards like this. They’re going to create a whole new class of webmaster whiners.
Pretty much, if the results are relevant, then they are good.
I’m not so sure about that. If I have 10,000 per month and you have $999 per month, I guarantee you that I will seriously outlink you. The difference now is that it won’t be webmasters who are earning the money for putting up links. It will be other people earning the money… like writers, for instance. At the end of the day, the 10,000 guy will still be dusting the 999 guy in the search engines.
It will just be people other than webmasters that are making the money. Anyway, this doesn’t worry me since I don’t really buy links either. I just think it is bad for webmasters in general.