Does Google really honour NoFollow Attribute?

[reggy]

I was just wondering if google really honours the nofollow attribute because i can see a no of youtube backlinks that googlebot found as recent as March 2008 - so why would google show it as a backlink if its meant to ignore it?

Thanks

[tedster]

This topic comes up every couple of weeks. Here's a recent discussion on the topic:

Nofollow links showing up in backlinks [webmasterworld.com]

Many types of nofollow backlinks are still reported by Google - Wikipedia, blog comments, whatever. But Google's ranking algo and their backlink reporting are clearly two different things. Just because a link shows up doesn't mean that it is helping a site's ranking.

Here's a comment I made in another thread:

When Matt Cutts says that nofollow links are "dropped from the webgraph", that means they are not included in PageRank calculations.

Matt also said that nofollow links are "not even used for discovery.". So that should mean that a url with only nofollowed backlinks (a very odd critter that would be) would not even get indexed. I've seen some recent nofollow experiments for the purpose of "page rank sculpting" - they do seem to show that the second point is true.

Also, Google developed a kind of back-office nofollow tag long before it was released as a general recommendation, originally for user generated content. Many people lost PR during that period - especially from blog comment spam - and didn't know why exactly.