Applying the nofollow link attribute, rel=”nofollow”, to some or all of your links on pages/posts can make a lot of sense if you want to lower the number of outbound links and preserve more pagerank.

A lot of outbound linking, where “nofollow” is not applied, is often viewed as pagerank leakage, almost a weakening the pagerank potency of your webste. Conversely going mad and making every link nofollow can be frowned upon by the search engines so as with most things a degree of moderation is required and monitor your website for effects.

Rel=”nofollow” was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments, due to the amount of blog comment spamming. The idea being that if spammers are spamming in blog comments to get better SEO and anchored links for their sites, nofollow would render such spam useless.

Rel=”nofollow” does not mean that search engines won’t spider the link destination; they will follow the link, spider the page and count the link as a backlink. What rel=”nofollow” means is that PageRank/TrustRank does not pass from your site to there’s; obviously a hit of page rank from another site further enhances your reputation in the eyes of Google as it is viewed as a sign that you trust and recommend the site so when that isn’t passed on it one less significant benefit to the link.

Many people opposed to the use of rel=”nofollow” in blogging argue that it is a sign of mistrust, however there are some very legitimate reasons for using it and I think that every website owner should decide who to pass on the benefits of their PageRank/TrustRank to. This is why there is a backlinks industry where people pay for backlinks that have “nofollow” switched off – backlinks have value.

Since the use of rel=”nofollow” in comments on Wordpress blogs is a default, many bloggers do not even realise they are using it. If you run a wordpress blog and want visitors to be rewarded for taking the time to contribute it is possible to use DoFollow plugins and share your link love, such as:

DoFollow: Which includes the ability (optional) to remove nofollow from comments after a period of time.
or
Lucia’s Link Love: Which removes nofollow after a certain number of comments have been made – this rewards regular commenters

WARNING: if you disable “nofollow” on your blog make sure you either moderate your blog or have a good spam filtering for your comments e.g. Akismet and SpamKarma for Wordpress.