no follow links are not completely useless, if you have received a no follow link and you are getting targeted traffic from it, then it's beneficial
rel="FOLLOW" as you asked is a meaningless tag. rel="nofollow' is the only tag that holds any value. even rel="dofollow" is a meaningless tag. There is no such tag as that and spiders as well as browsers will ignore it. rel="follow" will give a normal link.
Guys, Have searched around here and cannot find the answer, so apologies if this has been dealt with before or if it is a dumb question. I understand the need (I think) for rel=nofollow on links such as reply etc. But I actually want the search engines to count the links in signatures on my forum. This is a big plus for members (like here). It helps them with their own SEO. I have sig links on my forum for my own profile, but none of them appear in Google. Can this feature be turned on some how? To allow sig links to be counted. Or conversely, is there something I have trned off? Just to illustrate the point. My sig links on my own forum Supply Chain Focus don't get picked up by Google, but my sig links here on DigitalPoint do? So what have they turned on here to allow that?
You may use rel="nofollow" both in the internal and external links which you don't want the search engine spider follows. It´s a way of sculpting PageRank™ in a page as well.