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Good question. I've seen 1-2 other people wondering about this. The short answer is that we'll make sure the rel="nofollow" takes precedence. Otherwise spammers could exploit this.

rel=follow does nothing, but having two rel= attributes might cause G to ignore the second one.

So if Google ignores the second attribute rel="nofollow" does it mean Google will treat this link as a normal (follow) link?

you only need to use one attribute rel="nofollow", if you want the URL to be followed then all you have to do is not have rel="nofollow", simples eh?

Thanks for your reply Martin. However, my question is if what Chris Hunt said was true "having two rel= attributes might cause G to ignore the second one", would Google treat the link as a normal link or a nofollow link?

What I really want to know is whether spammers can use this technique to bypass the ref="nofollow" attribute.

Multiple occurences of the same attribute are treated as if the values specified were in a single attribute.  However since there is no "follow" value defined for the rel attribute it won't have any effect.

Good question. I've seen 1-2 other people wondering about this. The short answer is that we'll make sure the rel="nofollow" takes precedence. Otherwise spammers could exploit this.

I haven't tested this in a while but a couple of months ago, when you apended rel="follow" before a "nofollow", the link would pass pagerank and anchor text. Fact.

I believe if you used rel="insertanythingelsehere" before a "nofollow", the link would not be followed. It had to be "follow". So Google do/did abide by the directive at link level and (a couple of months ago) when I tested again.

So I am not sure whether Google have actually closed this off now or just looking into it as Matt says ;-)

"... I haven't tested this in a while but a couple of months ago, when you apended rel="follow" before a "nofollow", the link would pass pagerank and anchor text. Fact. ..."

Got to ask - how did you verify that it passed PageRank?
And LinkText relevancy?

(The only way I can think of is that it jsut so happened that it was the only link to a given page, from a high ranking page.  No internal links to that page - just that 1 single link.  That 1 single link happened to have a completely unqiue, not used on the page on in context to the rest of the site bit of text.?  G have made it damned hard for us to prove anythign as Fact now adays - so I am very interested to know how you did it .... as I admit, I'll make notres and copy it :D)

No testing environment with Google is ever perfect, but you are on the right lines.

Matt might confirm what I said, but maybe they are just looking into it now ;-)

Thanks a lot guys for your helpful answers and especially Matt for confirming about this.

I seen this idea discussed on many forums.  at most sites the rel="follow" insertion would not be added at all when posting to sites with rel="nofollow" default on outbound links.

it is a contradiction in terms..are search engines made for following links?If it is true, rel=follow has no sense (different is rel=nofollow)