Nofollow links seem to help with getting the target indexed. So, the spammers create their second and third tiers of actual content on sites that do not use nofollow. However, they'll use anything with any kind of links to get those tiers crawled and indexed.

i guess thats what they did. funny, it seems they got penalized regardless somehow, because i started getting emails asking to please remove the spam they posted.

Edit: It seems some of them were trying to damage competitor's SEO ranking by posting irregular links. SEO is wild west.

Thankfully the old "blasting links" type of SEO is pretty much dead now.

When you say something similar do you mean also not indexed, or do you mean you ran a text submission site with nofollow links?

nofollow, but indexed

I'm not convinced that nofollow == no value.