Quick reminder: NoFollow is an HTML attribute used for hyperlinks on a page. The link remains a text link but Google Spider won’t follow them, or won’t give credit to that link for rankings (the link juice is not passed). Google has set up this originally to fight against spam. Indeed, links from comments on blogs or any other websites are now NoFollow, as people were abusing of it for having quick and cheap backlinks for their website. Wordpress automatically have Nofollow links now.
However, if you don’t like the idea of Nofollow, you can still install a DoFollow plugin for Wordpress.
I like Nofollow for another reason: it gives you the possibility to sculpt the Pagerank on your website. There are some pages on our websites, we don’t especially want spiders to visit. Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy, Recruitment, and all other corporate pages (most of the time on the footer), should all be NoFollow. Indeed, there is no real use to pass link juice of those pages. We better keep/save the pagerank for the important pages.
Another way to optimize your website with NoFollow, is with the “Home” link which should be on every page of your website. “Home” is a very bad anchor text, and therefore you should change it OR, you could add another link on every page with a rich anchor text this time (a breadscrumb is ideal for that situation). If you do so, you MUST NoFollow the “Home” link. That way, Google would only take in consideration the new link with the bad ass anchor text.
Another way to use NoFollow: Spiders don’t like pagination. If you have pagination with hundreds of pages, chances are that Spiders won’t visit all of them AND there is no real value to have all those pages receiving link juice anyway. One more time, we want to save that link juice. So I recommend keeping the first 2 pages (if not only the first) as normal, and adding the NoFollow attribute to every other pages.
I’m not a big fan of NoFollow for external linking. Links on blog comments should be accountable for SEO rankings, as they are most of the time (when not spam) a really authoritative source. Some webmasters unable NoFollow so their comments with plugins.
However, there are ways to manage NoFollow in our advantage for internal linking.