What if you could link to anybody (even a competitor) but without giving them any PageRank popularity boost? Well, now you can.

Mind you, we're not saying you should ...only that you can. Of course the new wrinkle in the search engine fabric we're speaking of is the recent recognition of the nofollow tag by Google, Yahoo, and MSN. In case you're just catching on, here's the reasoning behind the change according to Google:

If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

Funny thing is, blogs aren't the only place the nofollow tag can be used to affect rankings. Speculation is that webmasters and marketing managers will begin using it to selectively dole out page popularity in ways that are consistent with their own (selfish?) ranking efforts.

Consider, for example, a page with 20 outbound links. Let's suppose that 15 of those links go to offsite pages while the remaining five link to pages within the site. Since a page's popularity vote (i.e., PageRank) is divided amongst the total number of outgoing links, each link is theoretically worth 1...