That is, search engines put it there to make people feel like they can do something about spam, but it is up to the search engine if they really honor nofollow or not. Web site operators are so afraid of losing pagerank that many of them stopped linking to other web sites long ago or tagged everything "nofollow" so there might be more ham than spam marked "nofollow".
(There was that time I went to a conference and an exec from Bing was there and I told him if Matt Cutts, his counterpart from Google, was there I would have ordered a cream pie from room service since Google is notorious for gaslighting and giving false info to webmasters)
Note people can click on a nonfollow link and get you to go their web site also and I'd say that is real measurable traffic, whatever effect PageRank may or may not have on their rankings is not measurable.
That is, search engines put it there to make people feel like they can do something about spam, but it is up to the search engine if they really honor nofollow or not. Web site operators are so afraid of losing pagerank that many of them stopped linking to other web sites long ago or tagged everything "nofollow" so there might be more ham than spam marked "nofollow".
(There was that time I went to a conference and an exec from Bing was there and I told him if Matt Cutts, his counterpart from Google, was there I would have ordered a cream pie from room service since Google is notorious for gaslighting and giving false info to webmasters)
Note people can click on a nonfollow link and get you to go their web site also and I'd say that is real measurable traffic, whatever effect PageRank may or may not have on their rankings is not measurable.