while I do believe that the following brilliant explanation of yours makes a totally perfect sense:

However, forcing every wordpress.com user to link to the tags pages does substantially increase the chance of said tag pages turning up in Google searches. More people coming in from Google = more people seeing the ads. The baffled wordpress.com users are just collateral damage.

at the same time, I should say that I still could never see a single ad on tag pages *by myself* (this, of course, doesn’t mean they aren’t there at all, but anyway).

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as much I’m really sick of the misleading propaganda on the fora, as I am having to repeat any reasonable arguments in vain.

please, the only and main reason “WP.com does things this [fucking] way” (denying any compromises) is just MONEY and GREED!

Blogs marked private are allowed to opt out because their linkbacks won’t count for anything in Google. Mature blogs are not, because the global tag links were never intended to be useful for anyone other than Automattic. So what if they’re forced to link to pages that have nothing to do with them?

They (autogenerated links) are not there to redirect traffic or send people to other content they might find interesting; they’re only saying that to bribe people into continuing to host the links. They exist to build PR for wordpress.com blogs and Sphere’s external partners.

absolutely!

And the majority are going to be identical ’sorry, no results’ pages. And 404s, if anything, are going to have more ad clickthroughs than pages with actual content.

unfortunately, those ’sorry, no results’ are not even 404s (as they should be). instead, they are full blown 200 OK pages.

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engtech, perhaps you would like more the following (truly honest) argument regarding opting-out of the Global Tags:

…basically global tags are important to the WordPress.com model. They help to drive traffic to individual blogs as well as WordPress.com as a whole. Tightly linking blogs together like this is a good search engine voodoo.

Allowing people to opt-out could dilute the model’s potency. Hardly you’ll see this change any time soon.

The thing that really boggles the brain is that he’s not even trying to slide that past penguins or Snow Lovers; he’s talking to forum volunteers who have been around the site for a while and expecting them not to recognise it as bullshit. Maybe he just assumes that anyone still helping out there must be stupid?

If Automattic want to prove they’re doing this for users’ benefit rather than for Google’s, they can no-follow the links or let people use the feature locally.