> > My short answer is that the nofollow attribute on links is a pretty
> > general mechanism, and you're welcome to use it how you like.

> I would LIKE to use it to automagically increase my SERPs positions.
> I don't think that will happen though.  :-()

> Seriously though, I always thought of ad-hoc standards, like
> robots.txt, sitemap.xml etc the same as W3C RFCs and ITU-T
> Recommendations, both with an emphasis on "recommendation".

> People may have had their various, and usually different reasons for
> wanting a given recommendation but once it is out in the wild, people
> are pretty much free to use it as they wish, on both sides of the
> interoperability table.

> One question I still have is regarding, "(e.g. a link through a page
> that is robot.txt'ed out)".

> I am not understanding the "through a page" part.

> I read in the linked to interview, "Now, robots.txt says you are not
> allowed to crawl a page, and Google therefore does not crawl pages
> that are forbidden in robots.txt. However, they can accrue PageRank,
> and they can be returned in our search results."

> So, to achieve the same thing in a robots.txt file as in the use of
> nofollow, you would essentially need three pages, the first page with
> a link to the second, which is disallow'ed and has a link on it to a
> third, the page one originally wanted nofollow'ed?

> Is that the meaning of "through a page"?

> By the way, I was surprised to read that a page that is "disallowed"
> and is not crawled can show up in SERPs.  Would that be possible only
> because of offsite inbound links to that page?  If a bot can't crawl a
> page, how else could it know what is on the page in order to decide
> what search terms to rank it for?

> Craig