I'm guessing what is really holding you back is your seeing the
difference between the two situations.

On one hand, a polite request for confirmation, which doesn't preclude
the possibility of additional information or references being known.

And, on the other hand, a confrontational claim seemingly based on the
assumption that absence of knowledge equals knowledge of absence which
almost by definition precludes knowing of available information or
references.

Maybe we can just chalk it up to a difference in communication styles
although you have to know that if one starts out on the offensive,
someone invariably has to "lose".  ;-)

Right, it still seems "wacky" though.  (I'm beginning to like that
term!)

That's definitely wacky!  :-()

What I was thinking was actually to get rid of the intermediate page
and just nofollow a link to a disallow'ed target page.  That would
seem to work for Google at least, I think.

The Wikipedia article seems rather confusing at times.

It states, "experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results".

But, the SEO experiment(s) cited doesn't seem to prove much of
anything as to whether or not Google follow'ed nofollow'ed links.

About the only thing the cited experiment shows is that Google didn't
index the experiment page for quite some time.

I was thinking the Wiki article could be helped with a definition of
"follow" but at the same time, what "follow" actually means is moot as
it is implementation/search engine specific, the real questions are
concerning indexing, SERPs and PageRank.

So, saying someone "follows" something or not seems to add nothing
except confusion.

Either that or I am easily confused.  :-()

Part of the problem is the Wiki page confused the hell out of me as it
seems to say a lot about very little and cited experiments seem to not
prove what they set out to or what they are claimed to.

The PageRank "leakage" would seem a very important point, which is
definitely one I had missed before.

As far as a nofollow'ed link not passing ranking juice, it would seem
that Yahoo does seem to follow the original intent more closely by not
involving other issues, like indexing and related, showing up in
SERPs, for which one should use nodinex of one really cared.

I think it might be easily agreed though that "nofollow" might not
have been the most appropriate name for this tag, at least without an
agreed upon definition of what "follow" means.

Maybe "nolinkjuice" would have been more fitting.  :-()

True, although all I am really concerned about is Google, for which a
nofollow'ed link to a disallow'ed page, with no intermediate page,
seems like it should work.

It is not that I don't care about ranking in MSN or Yahoo but instead,
even when I essentially wiped out a site's PageRank in an experiment,
search results and indexed page counts for Yahoo and MSN didn't even
seem to notice.

True, it is wacky but then again, the whole seemingly ill named
nofollow thingy is wacky so what do you expect?  :-()

I think were it better named, it wouldn't be so strange but as it is,
since it seems everyone has their own definition, it ends up with one
having to try to thread a needle from ten feet away to keep everyone
happy.

That would be my guess as well.  We can already see pages that are in
various SERPs purely due to linkage.  But, doesn't that bring up the
whole "Google bombing" thingy?

Although that's a whole other subject and I don't want to get into
here, if a page can show up in SERPs due to inbound anchor text alone,
how is that not the equivalent of what one does when attempting
"Google bombing"?  Maybe there is a distinction somewhere but I seem
to be missing it if there is.

It depends on your definition of "detailed".  ;-)

I don't have any of my names on a given site at all yet due to
external anchor text alone, the site shows up third for one of my
names, out of almost 2 million available pages!

I could agree though that a search on an actual name could be
considered pretty detailed so maybe that isn't quite fair.

But, even though I know a search for an allow'ed/index'ed/follow'ed
page is different than a nofollow'ed page, I wonder if it makes any
difference, once the page is actually in Google's index, one way or
another.

Either way, it's just plain wacky!  :-()

"disallowed pages look", I've never seen that.  Can you describe it or
do you have an example of it?

I seem to remember someone somewhere talking about it but I don't
think I've ever seen what it ends up looking like in the SERPs.

I know, I lead a sheltered life.  :-()

:-()

How about "The Search is mightier than the auction." or maybe, "no
search tingy, no auction tingy".  :-()

I would tend to agree, to an extent. Speaking about nofollow by
itself, if I link to a page on my site without a nofollow link and you
link to it from your site, with a nofollow link, I would hope it would
still have a chance to show up in SERPs so from a "prior knowledge"
point of view, I can understand.

But, if only nofollow links exist, I would think it shouldn't ever
show up although I don't think it possible to prove experimentally one
way or another as it can actually be hard to get people to either not
link at all to a given page or, have them link using the "correct"
method to protect the experiment.

Of course if we change that around and I nofollow'ed a link to a page
on my site and you link to it from yours but don't nofollow it, Google
indexing the page and returning it in SERPs based on your "vote" by
linking to it without a nofollow would seem consistent with PageRank
in general.

Right, but at the same time, I search for any one of my names and they
all lead to one of my sites.

Thinking about that, could the difference between your and my case be
that Google possibly sees your site in a similar light as John Chow's?

Anyhoo, I've forgotten what we were talking about.  :-()

Oh yeah, I remember now, to be safe across all search engines and one
needs 3 pages, source, intermediate and target but, for Google alone,
it would seem that only the source and destination are needed with the
source page link being nofollow'ed and the target page being
disallow'ed, is that right?

Craig