Is it going to become "neccessary" to add nofollow to "View Cart" or "Home" links

You should definitely nofollow the "view cart" link, Dave.

From Matt Cutts blog…

If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.

Sorry, not my job. If your search engine is affected by "something", and you don't want it to be, fix it. If it's not providing the kind of results you want it to, fix that too.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of, and wholeheartedly support, disclosure. Disclosure for whom pages are ultimately intended.

A very good friend once told me…

Make something idiot proof and the world builds a better idiot"

Is it going to become "neccessary" to add nofollow to "View Cart" or "Home" links because the poor search engine can't deliver "quality" results to the searcher if it ever becomes a popular query?

Dave

I understand that you want me to tell you that a link is paid for and shouldn't pass any value by adding the nofollow tag to it. I would have thought a great big search engine like you would be better at determining how much value a link should pass but that's just me. Just the same, I'd be pleased to help you out determining value.

Since you appear to need my help in determining which links links should pass no value, you must need my help in determining how much value the other links should pass right? Would you like me to use rel="pass50%" or would you prefer rel="mongoimportant"?

I could also help you determining where to rank my pages and their relevance if you like. Perhaps some new meta tags…

meta name="ranking" content="This page should rank #1. Please see meta relevance tag to figure out for what."

meta name="relevance" content="This page is relevant for the follong phrases… phrase1,phrase2,etc. Please see meta ranking tag to figure out where to rank this page for these phrases."

Eagerly awaiting your reply.

Dave

That'd teach 'em.

…

Google's spider, OTOH, is going to have to figure out how to read the disclosures like the rest of us do.

If they own all the sites, then IMO those are internal links. Which search engines can and do interpret as they see fit.

No SE has the right to know how I get visitors or, what content I allow the visitors to view (this includes inbound and outbound links). If what I'm doing violates an FTC ruling. That is between me and the FTC.

How an SE treats links is up to them. Search results are a product. If the product is flawed that is an internal problem of the SE.

Networks are built for the end user not SEs. PCWORLD can buy, start or affiliate it's self with a different subject matter(***). Dan would your position on network links change if one of those footer links was too ***.com?