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.

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.

Yes, ...

... rel="nofollow" is not about spam prevention, it's about making the goal of spam to do SEO ineffective.

... I know ...

Even if the bot does not follow the links from a forum entry (because that's all that happens), it gets to know them and can index the link targets independently. The only relevant difference is the by the attribute value "nofollow" not granted advantage in page ranking.

... this.

Again, using the attribute rel="nofollow" does not prevent you from being found by Google or whatever other searchbot. It only prevents the bonus of an additional value for the page rank.

This is my last post on this topic. I swear

For the fact that it started with an obvious misunderstanding of a (non-existent) function of the software, a surprising amount has been written here in a surprisingly short time . As you mentioned before, all relevant is said by (more or less) everyone.

Tschö, Auge