Many ppl including me said that Yahoo does not obey nofollow tag. Well it seems that they follow the links but does not give any credit to them for ranking. Check it out those who are sceptical http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/indexing/nofollow.html
I am surprised people think that. They also follow nofollow, noindex. They also parse noindex, and they also parse files disallowed in the robots.txt What they agreed NOT to do is to INDEX it for all to see in the displayed search results. I used to cloak, back in 1999 to 2002 inclusive, and I watched my logs very carefully. I saw that these files where being requested by FAST, Gulliver, Inktomi, Googlebot, and various other spiders independent of the robots.txt, noindex, and meta nofollow (the link attribute nofollow didnt exist back then). But they never indexed said.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/webcrawler/slurp-12.html Yahoo! Slurp obeys the rel="nofollow" attribute for links. web publishers and blog owners can apply a rel="nofollow" attribute to any hyperlink on their page to indicate that the link may not be an approved or trusted link. Note: Slurp may use a "nofollow" link for discovering content, but the link will not be considered an "approved" link for consideration for ranking of the target page. This attribute works to reduce the benefits of comment abuse. For instance, websites with public comment areas can apply a "nofollow" attribute to publicly entered links to fight comment spam.
meep99, correct. just because they dont count the link as a vote, does not mean they dont follow it. the poster also was not completely clear as to whether the nofollow was in reference to the anchor attribute, or if it was in reference to the meta tag nofollow. However, it seemed to indicate he was referring to the former. thanks for the further information, specifically, in regard to the purpose of the nofollow to viewers.
do the link command on yahoo, and you will see how they put all your links in order. most of my top links have nofollow tags, but have high PR rankings
That's the purpose of nofollow. If you don't want pages indexed by specific search engines, use robots.txt, noindex/nofollow meta tags. MSN/Live Search regonizes rel=nofollow as well.
Any good or decent search engine follows the right technique, no follow was developed in regard to keeping it right. Its quite normal that such a good search engine is following what it should. Whoever tells it otherwise is surely selling something to you.
I think there is a difference between following and scoring the link. They may still "follow" and record the link, but the vote won't count. However, I still feel that nofollow links are good for other purposes such as link velocity, keyword placement, etc.