Good question. The reason that I would use ‘nofollow’ is if you truly don’t want a page to be indexed at all. For example, a login page; Googlebot doesn’t know how to login, and that’s not of any value for users to have.
I can imagine a disclaimer or a privacy statement could be kind of useful. You can put those links on, it’s not like its going to cause you a spam penalty, but truthfully, I would tend to worry more about having enough good links because you have enough great content that you tend to get a lot of people linking to you, and you tend to get a lot of good coverage in Google’s index.
It’s a second order effect at best. I really wouldn’t spend a lot of time saying ‘Oh, I’m going to ‘nofollow’ all my links to my stuff that I don’t care about’. Typically, you do better by maybe linking or not linking to stuff. You know, link to a privacy policy once, but you don’t have to link to it on every page of your site, for example, or something like that.
But, really, I would only use it for the pages that you really don’t want to be in Google at all. Don’t worry so much about sculpting, that tends to take a lot more time and not really be as big bang for your buck; compared to just putting your efforts in on making great content that will attract links.
Related posts:
- Do you feel that the widespread and blanket use of nofollow tags is devaluing Google’s search algorithms? Examples such as Wikipedia, where ALL external links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google’s algorithms? Do Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from the well established authority websites, such as Wikipedia?
- Is over-optimization bad for a website? Ex – excessive use of nofollow.
- Now that Google can crawl JavaScript links, what is going to happen to all those paid links that were behind JavaScript code? Will Google start penalizing them?
- Does Google treat links in footers differently than links surrounded by text (e. g. in a paragraph)?
- What are your views on “PageRank” sculpting? Useful and recommended if implemented right, or unethical?
