SEO Skeptic

An SEO Skeptic gold star to Aaron Wall for his post today regarding PageRank scultping, Expert SEO Testing: Usually Worthless.  Since the recent "announcements" that Google is now basically disregarding efforts at controlling internal linking using the nofollow attribute - "PR sculpting" - there's been a whole lot of hand-wringing in the SEO community about Google getting their messaging straight.  These usually public protestations don't actually address the point Wall makes so well in his post:  was there genuine value in using nofollow for PR sculpting anyway?
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When Google introduced paid link reporting via Webmaster Tools in 2007, in marked the second time human informants were solicited to help the search engine.  The first - less contentious - invitation a year earlier was the spam report, by which conscientious website owners (or their minions) could report such things as sneaky JavaScript redirects, doorway pages and even "misleading or repeated words."  These share with paid links the characteristic that they are potentially hard to detect, and indicate that the machines crunching through all those web pages are still occasionally outsmarted by some upstart human.
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