Do Follow v No Follow

This is a topic that seems to appear in many forums that I visit. Every body seems to have their opinion on it however who's is right?

The rel="" atribute relates to whether a search engine will pass link juice to the linked site. Some people seem to think that a link that is "nofollow" is worthless. Well it is not! Firstly, it still has the potentilal of passing traffic from users, and most importantly g00g!e DOES count "nofollow" links as backlinks. I tested this by placing a nofollow link for one of my site on one of my sites and 5 days later the link is visable within my webmaster tools, therefore concluding that g00g!e does count these links.

So for all the newbies out there, if you are looking to increase your backlinks, dont get hung up of "follow" and "nofollow", just get the links out there. The only time you need to be concerned about this is if you are solely looking to increase your Page Rank, but as we all know Page Rank does not really mean much nowadays!

I've read a lot of mixed messages on the nofollow vs. ******** deal as well and I'm still not sure who to believe. If you ask 10 people you'll get 10 different answers.

To muddy the water even more, if I have nofollow outbound links on my site, and they ARE credited as a backlink for those sites I link to, does that page still get "penalized" for the outbound link? i.e. does the page that links out to other sites get dinged with bleeding PR even though I've labeled my outbound links as nofollow? That would be a test case I'd like to know the answer to. I think everyone tries to be cognizant in the volume of outbound links so as not to drain the PR of the page.

I guess that's way too optimistic but hypothetically, you could have an unlimited number of outbound links on a page to your other sites, all tagged as nofollow, and reap the rewards of the backlinks without the negative effects of PR bleed from that page. I don't think G00gle would ever be that kind though