Look at it this way – if it drives webmasters “underground”, it’s bad.
Don’t get me wrong. I would love to see blog spam disappear. But I repeat – this tag will be abused to death.
We cannot assume that all – or even most – webmasters:
1. Are still updating their sites
2. Are ethical
3. Understand that PR means almost nothing
4. Understand that most of them should NOT need this tag
The funniest thing is that the people at the engines are not stupid people. There is something going on here that they have not told us, because after thinking about it a bit, there is zero chance they would have missed the problems I described.
I’m going to shut up for a while about this. I am certain there is something very screwy going on here, and that this tag will either be discontinued or be ignored before long.