Does a "nofollow" attribute on a link prevent URL discovery by search engines?

Posted by Stephen Ostermiller on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Stephen Ostermiller
Published on 2013-11-05T16:52:32Z Indexed on 2013/11/05 22:13 UTC
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I know that nofollow prevents link juice from being passed across a link. But if search engine robots discover a link with a nofollow on it, will they add that link to their crawl queue?

In other words, if I create a link to a brand new page and put a rel=nofollow attribute on that link, will it prevent search engine bots (particularly Googlebot) from crawling the page. (Assuming that this link remains the only link into that page.)

I've read conflicting reports about this over the years and I'm looking for authoritative references about the current state of affairs. Official statements from Google or published results of independent testing would be ideal.

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