lucy24 - 2:53 am on May 1, 2011 (gmt 0)

How could I tell my "no follows" are working..if I recently added new ones towards particular links?

Just wait for the next new robot to show up. If you've got a decently sized site, that should be, oh, within the next half-hour or so.

And does "no following" a link eventually remove it from google if it was previously cached before ? But i'm expecting a reply is going to stay I need to restrict in Robots.txt to pull them from the cache.

Far as I can tell, once google knows a page exists, they'll keep crawling it forever. And once they know a page doesn't exist, they'll still keep crawling it forever just to make sure it doesn't rematerialize. (Analogy to the common cold presents itself.)

You'd think, wouldn't you, that after trying a page eight or ten times and not finding it, the computer would go back one step and check whether your internal links to the page are still there, or whether it's still on your sitemap, or...