If you owned or managed Google, would you utilize no-follow links to rank or guage websites? Me ... I would to some degree. If my job is gathering data and search results, I'd be very interested in any websites and the content. At minimum, I'd sample the no-follow links. Personally, I think that Google uses many of them anyway.
For some reason I feel that with all of the talk that Google gives to relevancy, they would follow the link. That does not mean they are going to give any weight to the link, but would at least follow it. Additionally, to me it would make more sense if Google paid more attention to a relevant no follow link than it did to a completely spam-like do follow with absolutely not relevance to the destination... Just my $.02...
I guess there is some (small) value to no follow links but as you say the real daddy is the follow lnks. I would not say no to a free high PR no-follow link but like with most of these things G play the value of such a link pretty close to their chest
This has been covered here many, many times. G uses rel="nofollow" as a way for web coders to *not pass PR*. That is all it does. PR. Period. G still follows them and uses them in every other way. People confuse this with robots="nofollow". The two are very very different.
Thanks longcall911, never new there were 2 different nofollows. I do know you can get traffic from nofollow links and if that traffic stays on your page and or clicks a link, that can help your pr.
I'd tell everyone that no-follow links weren't followed to try and keep spam at a min. In my SERPS I wouldn't have any difference. Sounds like I agree with what they're doing lol
No follow helps Google to reduce spammers from ranking their site. Google is more on quality and not on spam quantity of links.