Nofollow in image links and Image maps – Does search engines follow it?

I am sure everyone knows what are Nofollow tags by now, Nofollow tags are used in hyperlinks to make a search engine crawler know that the link which has it is not trustworthy and should not be given the necessary link credit. Its vastly used in forums, blogs, message boards etc to prevent spam, Comment spam is a very popular spam that is spoiling many quality blogs. To stop this search engines combindely released a tag called rel=Nofollow to let the crawlers not to give any credit for the link.



Ok so we know about rel=Nofollow in text links are followed I don't think many of you will know that search engines can crawl image maps and links from images very easily and any extra tagging in Nofollow tag is followed.


Search Engines have no trouble following image map links and links from on images. Any Nofollow tags from image maps is followed without hindrance.

Here is an example:



for example: