steveb - 10:50 pm on Mar 29, 2008 (gmt 0)

It would be absurd to not pass pagerank but to pass trustrank. Besides its impossible. I you can't discover a URL via a nofollow link, then you obviously can't assign it trust rank.

The most suspect part of Matt's statement is they don't use them for discovery. If they did -- which an easy thing for us to prove -- then everything else is possible.