WTF? In the following screenshot, the salmon-colored squares are not part of the page, but are added by a Firefox one-liner that I use to help me spot links that have the evil, anti-web nofollow attribute. This is a very recent development, and I wonder what role the "do no evil" folks who now own Youtube are playing in this scheme. I don't know exactly what the game is, but perhaps they're trying to concentrate all the "juice" that they receive from links to a certain video into their specific sections of their site rather than it being spread to a large number of unrelated areas. In a typical page, the only links without the tag are: their navigation bar, the user's profile, the tags, the "See all videos" link, the Chevy promotion internal link, and their sitewide page footer.

I note also that the URLs that they allow those with "Director" status to put next to their videos not only have a nofollow tag, they go through a redirect script. I guess that might be better than a redirect script alone, but I believe that before those used to be regular links.

It's little things like this that may lead to people seeking an alternative. Note that Youtube used to have their own version of the "top syndicators" section, but as previously discussed they played around with that too.

If they're going to do things like this, is there any reason to not use the same tag when linking to Youtube?

(Note: the "F" where the video should be is because I use the flashblock plugin which allows me to control whether I play a Flash movie or not.)