Yep, you believe that. Right, so it's called Nofollow because the crawlers follow it.. got ya. Digg uses Nofollow, really ok then if you say so.
Ok, so is there a difference. I read nofollow but does it depend on how/where you use it? There seems to be two distinct uses. rel="nofollow" actually tells a search engine "Don't score this link" rather than "Don't follow this link." This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tells a search engine: "Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document.".
It is a fact that Google webmaster tools & Yahoo site explorer include 'no follow links' for a sites backlinks. Common sense will tell you that these links will not pass any link juice for a site - it does however confuse me why they apparently follow & list these links as back-links....
I think google do crawl a link with a no follow tag, but google don't pass any PR to links with no follow tag.
They dont crawl Nofollow links at all, they know the link exists but they do not follow it or crawl the Nofollowed page.
It gets tricky , this is from wikipedia ( which is not always correct either ) Interpretation by the individual search engines While all engines that support the attribute exclude links that use the attribute from their ranking calculation, the details about the exact interpretation of the attribute vary from search engine to search engine.[5][6] * Google takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. That is supposedly their official statement, but experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. They show instead that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page).[6] Links with "nofollow" are included in the backlinks reporting data at Google's Webmaster Central.[7] oddly this point here seems to break Wikipedia's no original research rule "but experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. They show instead that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
Yeah, that article confused me because it's partly contradicting itself. So it's saying that if the site has not been indexed then the Googlebot will see the nofollow link and not bother to index the site. However, if it's already been indexed then it doesn't say what this nofollow attribute does to the backlink, whether it still counts as a backlink or not. Ok so let's say it doesn't crawl it but it still knows the link is there and has a record of the site. Surely it will therefore add it to the Google link list?