Google began advocating the nofollow attribute as a way for webmasters to tell Google’s crawlers not to count a given link toward the PageRank of the site pointed to by the link. This attribute would help webmasters avoid the sting of being punished over paid links, which Google dislikes due to the way they can "game" the search rankings.

Webmasters had questions about nofollow, the answers to which ended up flung across the Internet. Blogger Li Evans asked Google in February why that situation hadn’t been cleared up by collecting all the answers in one place.

As Google’s well-known webspam fighter Matt Cutts told WebProNews how Google finally addressed the situation. They opened up the NoFollow Help Center within the webmaster help pages to help clarify the topic.

As Google explains, nofollow helps manage issues like comment spam, crawl prioritization, and the touchy issue of paid links. Watch Matt Cutts go over this attention-getting topic only on WebProVideo: