[Blog] Matt Cutts: PageRank flows and nofollow

What are your thoughts regarding what Matt Cutts is writing about nofollow ?

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

source: PageRank sculpting

Is it better to switch off "nofollow" in vBSEO to let PageRank flow freely throughout the forum ?

In my site, I've always had the nf switched off (or didn't code it in). From my point of view, not that worried about PR but want the GBot to crawl through my site - so I don't allow nf on except on external links.

If it's not resulting in a better channeling your link value, then it's usefulness is certainly diminished for Google. Of course, it's still useful for keeping the Googlebot, from crawling internal parts of your site that do not have high value content. Also, it can be used to remove links which are to low value pages.

However, the key takeaway here is that the best way to channel and converse PageRank is to evaluate which links should exist at all. For instance, the homepage is one area where many forum admins absolutely bleed link value (or PageRank) to pages that don't deserve a share of the homepage link value. Every non-vital link on the homepage should be removed for guests/bots if possible. We address topics like these in our Critiques quite often.