The nofollow rel tag, coming back to bite the bloggers butt

I saw that most bloggers have activated the rel="nofollow" tag protection on their blogs, in order to tell search engines not to follow the links in the comments.

While this doesn't stop comment spam at all, ( because spammers usually do comment spam to get visitors, not high Page Rank, so the nofollow tag doesn't stop visitors from following the link ) it is used - as many people think - to help Search Engines identify blogs and give them a lower ranking in search results.

In this very detailed article: http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2005/05/23/nofollow-revisited/ the nofollow tag is explained, along with many things implied by it.

We all know that blogs usually have a high Page Rank in Google. Because of this, is very easier for blog pages to show up high in the results, for many terms; however Google considered this "Blog noise" and it tried in many ways to fight it.

And with the nofollow tag it found the solution, using the trick of the mouse who gives a bell as a gift to the cat, for his own hidden benefit, Google gave bloggers the nofollow tag to use on their blogs to prevent links in comments from getting an increase in page rank.

Now Google can easily identify the blogs by their use of the nofollow tags, and give them a light decrease in results.

As any decent blog owner will use protection against automated spam ( that little images boxes with text or numbers ), and manually review and delete unrelated or abusive posts every once in a while, I don't see any use for the nofollow tag other than an egoistic drive to keep down the Page Rank on the sites of the friends that are posting comments.