I agree with you there but the point that I was making was that not a day seems to go by without some idiot coming out with one piece of software after another all promising the holy grail of an endless supply of inbound links that will help you with your SEO and they all seem to be targetting the Social Bookmark Directories.

Now it seems to me that this is now pretty pointless. With the adoption of the rel="nofollow" command this makes this exercise pretty worthless.

My other point is this. If the engines are now trying to crack down on "link spam" / worthless two way links then if you had loads of tags and book marks to your own sites (as loads do) and now they are all covered with rel="nofollow" then how much damage is that going to do to you? Surely these links will now be seen as almost spam as the "nofollow" command effectively says that "this is a link but not anything to do with us / we can't vouch for the usefulness, worth etc."

If the latter is the case and the various bots discover all these previously existing links to now be worthless, how much damage is that going to do to the sites that they were pointing to? If you are to believe certain sources then too many of these worthless inbounds will almost certainly harm your sites ranking.

So in actuality, if the rel="nofollow" command actualy prevents the spiders from going any further then it will surely harm your site and if this is the case then surely it is yet another way for some sites to harm their competitors by actually creating links to them?

On the other hand if all the "nofollow" command does is prevent any form of "PageRank / trustworthiness" being passed on to the site but is still usable for spiderable purposes then at least there is no harm done.