During the last PR update I watched a site go from PR 6 to PR 8 and I found out how they did it. They had a link from a page that was PR 9 but had a nofollow on the link tag. This page still showed up in the back links using: link: www.domain.com I submitted one of my sites to this same page as a test and walla... I have noticed a sudden increase in SERPS three weeks later could it be that nofollow links do have some weight after all?
nofollow can't contribute to PR - that's why Cutts and his mates are recommending that all paid links are made nofollow. They can have traffic value and, perhaps, might have some Yahoo/MSN worth.
Country boy is right. No follow does not add rank and if you use no follow for urls on your site they do not take rank from your site. I do not think many people will pay to have no follow links on sites because of this.
except pr reamning all things work in google for nofallow backlinks.yahoo also counts little and msn/ask hase full value
I'm doing some tests on this at the moment, no doubt Google are right when they say it won't pass PR... But i believe nothing in SEO until i've tested it personally.
perhaps there were some backlinks that you failed to notice, as google didnt list them. was this a site of yours, or a rival site?