On 5/1/06, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Domas and I visited the Google campus last week after the MySQL users conference, and chatted a bit with some folks from the search quality team. They assure us that, yes, rel="nofollow" *does* help prevent linkspam from having its intended effect and that, yes, at least some of the SEO folks end up giving up on sites because of it (though of course not all, and not immediately).
Also note that Wikipedia is different from most blogs and even wikis in that it's replicated across the web. Most of these mirrors aren't likely to turn on nofollow anytime soon.
Erik