rogerd - 1:41 pm on Jan 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

If someone is going to go to the trouble of IP-driven cloaking to hide a rel=nofollow attribute, there's nothing to say that they couldn't feed the SEs a page with a NOINDEX on it, or a page without your link appearing at all.

Personally, I don't believe that Google et al will treat the "nofollow" attribute as meaning "this link doesn't exist". I can certainly imagine them using it in identifying reciprocal links, if that is important to their algorithm. And if some sites seem to have an unusual number of nofollow links, I can imagine some kind of PR calculation adjustment.

IMO, the only way for a webmaster to ensure that outbound links aren't considered in some manner or other is to hide them completely by cloaking and feeding the SEs pages without the links. Whether this is worth the risk is questionable and depends on what the site is trying to accomplish.