I just love the way the world has ripped into Microsoft for failing to stick to recognised web procedures, creating their own proprietory procedures instead, yet Google create a nofollow tag for their OWN indaequecies, and many are fine with it.
Google DOES follow no follow links, it just doesn't apply any link benefit to the link. the nofollow means 'link beneift will not follow', Not no follow. (anyhow technically the spiders stopped 'following' links a long time agao, now they sit and wait for the next url to be snet to them before moving on. sometimes it will be the one they just sent back, but if there is another closer in iphops, then they go for that.
Noffolow is pants IMO, I hate it, it has caused FAR more problems that it solved.
The answer was quite simple. If google hired 100 people to surf and note sites actively selling links based on
PR, then they banned all these sites, (can anyone say 'Search King'
) it would send shockwaves through the link selling world, drive it underground, and out of the reach of the bulk of linkmongers.
Instead they come up with a system that only the good uys will use for its intended purpose, and the bad guys will use to channell pagrank to pages where they sell links
