If you're browser supports custom CSS files (which pretty much every browser does), you can just use the following:

    a[rel~="nofollow"] {
        background-color: rgba(255,0,0,0.10);
        //background-color: rgb(255,0,0);//for people without rgba
    }

Credit to Tom: http://tlrobinson.net/blog/?p=37

The rationale being that HN wants to reward the websites that hackers find useful or meaningful and not give free linking to spam?

Exactly. I wonder if the follow/no follow barrier should be raised due to karma inflation, though.

Here's an idea to reward high quality posts in a way robust to karma inflation: You could change the criteria for a follow/nofollow decision to use the time a link spends on the front page (e.g. the top 30). High scoring posts stay there for a while, while low scoring posts will drop off quickly.

A similar approach could be used to dynamically set the karma barrier, if you don't want to track the rank of individual posts.

I actually wonder if Google has things like this built in.

Do you think it knows that a 3000 point digg story is better than a 50 point story?

Seems redundant to me. A 3000 point Digg story will likely have many more inbound links than a 50 point story anyway.

Good point

Now if every site implemented something like this - I suppose that would be recreating pagerank in a way.

So while there's an SEO thread up here, anyone want to guess when my site thinkgene.com will get some pagerank? It's picked up some huge links and a couple blogrolls but still PR0.

How long does Google take to give a new site Pagerank these days?

page rank doesn't matter much (Except to those who don't matter) .. its actually behind by atleast 3-6 months .. so what you see is the pagerank they had for you 3-6 months ago; so when you do get one since your 7th best link is your YC profile and above that are blogspot links; I'm pretty sure it will be a 2-3 ,

We've had some really good links though... At least 10 PR5 or higher and 2 or 3 PR6. And yeah, I know PR doesn't matter, we're already getting about 100 hits a day from deep random searches. I just want the PR# for my personal satisfaction.

The best SEO thing we did was an April Fools Joke. It was surprisingly popular and got some really good links, not to mention an obscene amount of stumble upon traffic. And we're in the Wikipedia article for Manbearpig which is good for 30 hits a day.

what resources do you use to find out those links?

yahoo site explorer (dont forge the 'http://' in the adress or it won't work, ... yahoo gives the best link data and are openly sharing more (lately) [see search monkey]

I thought that the links are nofollow until an editor has validated them.

6 points

What SEO tool are you using?