I was sent this yesterday.

It says that Google has plans to roll out some significant changes to their ranking and ad system.

1. Get rid of Pagerank and replace it with Visitor Rank, where users with the Google Toolbar can thumbs up/thumbs down the site they’re on.

I can definitely see them getting rid of Pagerank. They really don’t want webmasters to focus on Pagerank and they want to discourage text link vendors. Why not bury bury Pagerank altogether?

Visitor Rank also makes sense as an ingredient in the hodge-podge that makes up a sites rankings.  Could be gamed, of course, but take the data with a grain of salt and it could prove very useful.

2. Confirmation click for AdSense

In theory, the visitor would have to click on a confirmation button after their first click on AdSense.  What? Two clicks to reach an advertiser?  When the company is still contending that click fraud isn’t a real problem?  This is really, really unlikely.  Advertisers don’t want their potential customers to have any friction.  This won’t happen.

3. Stop reporting of back links

Like the hiding of Pagerank, hiding back links also makes some sense. It’s valuable for webmasters to be able to find who’s linking to them, but for the SEO savvy, it’s used to help them build links to make them more attractive to Google, not to users.  Anyway, I think it’s possible they may do this, but not a slam dunk.

4. Replace “nofollow” with “dofollow”

This would require that links be tagged with “dofollow” or the search engine won’t follow it at all.  Now, that is just plain ridiculous.  If the blog post had sketchy credibility with me before, it lost it all on that one.  Google would throw out 99.999% of the links in the world and require everyone to retag their links?  That’s just silly.

I’d bet the post is a list of possible things that Google has considered, or a wish list of the engineer the blogger is citing (if there is one), or even a wish list of the blogger himself.  I just can’t believe that it’s a list of things that Google is launching in the near future, though the discussion is interesting…