 Nofollow was touted as an anti-spam measure.If you put rel="nofollow" in your href tags then the search engines are supposed to ignore the link. (It is actually not new, as there is a nofollow meta tag which would instruct the search engines to ignore all the links on the page). The no-spam aspect is that if forums and blogs used nofollow on the urls in comments, spammers wouldn't post crap comments to get links. On the SEO side... if you add your link to a directory that uses nofollows, it will not produce any SEO benefit for you. Some have the belief that links off your site bleed page rank and therefore it is better to use nofollow on everything to keep your page rank. I don't go for that theory as taken to the extreme it would mean is 100% of links on the web were nofollow, everybody would rank higher. That is of course impossible because the web is LINKS. What is interesting is how nofollows are actually used when you visually see them with that CSS mod above. If you look at del.icio.us for example, I think you'll find that every link off their site has nofollow. So bookmarking something there isn't going to help you in the search engines. p.s. we don't use nofollows here because we feel it is unnatural (a link is a link) and it is better to keep the messages clean of unrelated junk. | 
