Seems to me if you're maintaining your blog then most of your links won't be nofollowed. Also since .9.1 b2evolution doesn't publicly display stats, so the vast majority of links on any given b2evo blog aren't going to carry the nofollow gizmo. Thus who cares what the search engines think as long as they think (in general) that nofollow means it's a POS link?

jibberjab wrote:

It basically says that rel=nofollow not only stops search engine spiders from following a link, it is also seen, in the eyes of the search engines (Google specifically), as a "vote of no confidence" in the site being linked.
.

thats absolutely correct, and it was google's in(v)and(t)ention.

I admit, I do use it for commenter's urls, but then I also usually provide links back to blogs where the the person happens to be a regular commenter. On the other hand, the once-in-a-million passerby that happens to post a comment on my site, and leave a url -- nahhh, Im greedy with my pagerank.

I guess the way I'm reading that article may be a "worst possible situation" kind of thing (I like to look at all the angles, even the dark ones)... Basically, if you have tens of thousands of blogs that have rel=nofollow in their stats, and those blogs are getting referal hits from the b2evo site and the b2evo forums site, then both the b2evo and b2evo forums sites are getting one massive, cumulative, "no confidence" vote in the eyes of the search engines.

Additionally, the way I interpret the article, if a site uses a lot of rel=nofollow on its pages, and the outbound links are primarily 'nofollow' than that site itself can be seen as a spam site. If a site has 20 outbound links on one of its pages and, say, 15 of them are 'nofollow' then that site is saying 75% of the links on my page are to "no confidence / spam" sites. If that's the case, then what is that site itself but a spam site, since it allows those 'nofollow / no-confidence' links to exist on its pages...

That's what I'm getting from between the lines of that article... Whether the SE's make the distinction between sites and blogs is another matter, and could certainly impact on the way the rank/trustrank is interpreted, since blogs have unique referal issues to deal with which regular sites do not.

jj.

dunno, to be honest about the site using them being spammy, my pagerank went up 1 point (im a proud 5!!) :)