rel nofollow for pagers

FWIW I found I had to obfuscate pager links in php and change them back in the browser to keep bots from scraping pager links. No follow was insufficient.

If a site exposed a search capability that can match a lot of content, the pager will be a ridiculous drag on the server.

Yes, that's true, and it's really annoying how bots can bury a site. But there are some bots that can be "controllable". At least the nofollow is on of the rules that some search engine says that could be used to control spider bots... Anyway, maybe it will be better to allow to append custom attributes to each link of the pager, and let implementer to add whatever he wants?

Using rel="nofollow" on pagination links can actually hurt your website's SEO and indexability.
if anything we can add those ourselves if we reckon that could help fight bots per project, and for fighting bots there are other solutions outside of the scope of this I believe which makes more sense.

Closing this as won't fix