pageoneresults - 11:44 pm on Jul 9, 2008 (gmt 0)

If we take Google at their word, then the rel="nofollow" attribute is simply not followed at all, not even for url discovery.

Ya see, that is the part I could never really understand. If a scraper gets your content and then regurgitates it without all the nofollow stuff, what does that do?

I shouldn't knock the nofollow, all three of the majors worked on bringing that one to market, kudos. You probably won't find many "old, old school" SEOs using those things. If you are a publishing platform, then by all means, nofollow all of the comment links until such time that you've verified their quality and that "you trust them". That is what nofollow was meant for, to combat comment spam, bottom line.

The original protocol got somewhat warped shortly after its release and became a micro-tool for managing links. I'm sure Google saw this huge change in the link graph and they said to themselves, "hmmm, now looky there would ya, I do believe we have someone attemptin' to manipulate our algo. Would ya look at em all Pa!?"

nofollow was an "easy" way for Google to find what they were looking for. It served its purpose originally and still serves its purpose today. nofollow = micro-link manipulation. A clear signal in many instances. ;)