Hello,

but appearing as high up as possible in the search results for the sake of a better page rank is probably far more important to them.

How many pages have you been suggested by Google & co that have phishing content? I can remember exactly zero so far (so efficient). Again, the attribute has nothing to do with spam protection. If you do not want to transfer your own rank to the linked page - usually a human page - this attribute should be set. This, and only this, is the aim of this attribute. That's how I read the Google statutes, i.e. "Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don't want to imply any type of endorsement"

Yes, of course.

This is my last post on this topic. I swear

/Micha