Does using rel=nofollow really helps SEO?

Hi

I had the rel=nofollow attribute set for internal and external links with a few sites (like my other websites, wikipedia and such) on the whitelist.

However I spend a lot of thoughts on it today and decided to deactivate all rel=nofollow attributes.

Why did I do that?

The web is based on linking to different websites.
Google lives on links beeing set to other websites.

Since the introduction of rel=nofollow a large percentage of links is now marked with rel=nofollow even though they might be worth following for SERPS.

For my website a lot of links posted by my users are on topic and help users to find what they are searching for.
Why not pass PR to those sites? It does not hurt mine in any way

Google sees some sites as authority websites.

But how can you become an authority website if you don't want the SERPS to follow links that are set on your website?

I for myself think that google should follow links that are set on my website because most of the links are on topic and worth following.

I can't see the downside.


What are your thoughts on this?

StarBuG

ps: I really think that google does crawle nofollow links anyway and maybe even passes PR (or will pass in the future) because of the extensive use of the tag.
Otherwise the most important ranking factor that google uses is unusable anymore if most links that are set don't pass PR.

rel=nofollow has changed in recent times

It used to stop bots from leaving your site. It no longer does that.

But, you don't want to pass PR to bad sites as it can bring your site down as well. the only way to stop this is to block ALL sites, except your whitelist in your vbseoCP. As such, i recommend laeving this setting on and whitelisting a few good sites in your niche.... perhaps things like webmd.com and so forth.

rel=nofollow was implemented to prohitbate transfer of Page Rank from source website to external links.

However, rel=nollow will not really block bots/visitors from accessing external links.

And since when is passing Pagerank a bad thing?

Still I can't see the downside of not using rel=nofollow

besides the argument of linking to bad neighbors which a good moderator team can prevent

Trusting moderators to see every link is probably a bad business rule. No one reads every thread.

I'll checked about 2 years of threads on my forum and found no spam link.

Maybe I'll change my mind in the future again but for now I'll try it without