Does Google Ignore rel=nofollow for Non-Blog Links?

I started using Google Sitemaps several months ago to ensure that my site was getting fully indexed by the Googlebot. Aside from the obvious indexing advantages, Google Sitemaps also offer a few other insights to your web site. One of the more interesting ones is the Page Analysis feature.

Page Analysis has a Common Words section with 2 parts - words used in your site’s content and in external links to your site. The second part, words in external links, is the topic of this post.

The first time I glanced at this page I was surprised to see my name (Nick) show up as one of the words in external links. I can understand Nicholas Hebb being used to link to my site, because I use my full name when submitting FlowBreeze to software download sites.

I only used Nick Hebb in a link when posting to the Business of Software forum. Most forums I just use nhebb. The interesting thing is that Business of Software forum uses both a robots nofollow meta tag and the rel=”nofollow” attribute in links to avoid forum spam, just like Google recommends for Blogger users.

So I decided to do a test. For the last month, I changed my signature from Nick Hebb to Flow Chart Geek. The result: Geek now shows up as a a word used in external links in my Sitemaps Page Analysis.

I don’t know if this is conclusive evidence that Google is ignoring the nofollow attribute for non-Blogger users, but it seems to point that way.