On 16/08/05, Juliano Ravasi Ferraz ml@juliano.info wrote:

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[I wrote:] IIRC rel="nofollow" is badly named - it doesn't stop anything from following the link, only from using it to calculate page rankings. Unless I'm wrong about that, it's irrelevant for the current discussion.

According to http://www.google.com/webmasters/bot.html#www , a rel="nofollow" causes google not to crawl through that link.

No, according to that link "When Google sees the attribute rel="nofollow" on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results." That particular page doesn't make clear whether or not the page will in fact be added to the list of pages to crawl, but other discussions of the topic have assumed that it will. So, despite the name, the link *is* followed, it's just not used for ranking.