Most search engines are all about focus. You might hope that the nofollow attribute on some links will increase focus on the remaining ones. Do you think this is the case?

If you don't want to crawl some sites - always you can add them to robots.txt file. ;)

Well, since the original poster arbitrarily rules out any discussion of possible alternative explanations, the entire premise is completely without merit.

Yet another WMW discussion that really isn't worth reading further into, in my humblest opinion.

For the record, anyone who wants to NOFOLLOW their own content deserves to lose rankings regardless of whether that is the cause.

Michael,

Honestly - you need to stop it.

For a second, look at the concept of what I am pulling out the thread. Stop showing hate for WMW. Just look at what I am summarizing and theorizing.

Do you have anything to add now? If not, then no need to reply.

Interesting Barry. I'm not really sure why someone would want to nofollow internal links, but the theories above do make sense.

One thing though is that despite Google's claims I see evidence all the time they do crawl links that have nofollow applied. I see them showing up all the time in backlink checks. They may not count for much, but they do appear to be followed despited the attribute.

Recently I was looking at a site that had very little in the way of links other than a few hundred nofollowed blog comments and the homepage of the site ranked well for the anchor text in those nofollowed links

funny wikipedia isn't having these issues!

Wikipedia doesn't use the nofollow on internal links, only external links.

Rel=nofollow is technically equivalent to robots.txt disallow. I don't hear anyone telling me I shouldn't use robots.txt.

Halfdeck: no, I wouldn't say they are equivalent - a meta robots noindex is fairly close to a robots.txt disallow, but a rel=nofollow says 'I don't mean anything by this link'.
ie the rel=nofollow talks about the link while robots and meta robots talk about the page.

I have studied the effect of nofollowed links and I am pretty positive that they work fine with MSN and I am also pretty positive that even though Yahoo follows them and shows them as backlinks they do nothing at all, same with Google no affect whatsoever.

I have tried it and yes it does work with MSN, Yahoo and also Google.

I found this on the search engines. I hope Im not 6 months behind an answer. I have a site with over 100 links on each page. They have useful placement so I really dont want to cut them out. I hear that too many links (100+) can cause problems. Now a lot of the pages overlap links. I chose to use nofollow on a lot of them to reduce the amount of apparent links.

Page 1 has a follow link to page 3
page 2 has a nofollow link to page 3

I am assuming that page 3 will be followed by the googlebot from the 1st page, but the second example is just for the viewers.

A robot.txt doesnt help because I want the page followed.

I dont want google to follow all my links on a particular page but I want all the pages crawled.

I dont know whether nofollow means ignore link or if it counts my efforts as a no vote for my internal link

You shouldn't have more than 100 links on one page to other websites; inbound links don't count. I used nofollow attribute linking to some inner pages on my site and this caused them to be un-indexed. One should never do it.

Adding a robots.txt file definitely helps, if the search engine is in co-operation. The no follow instructs search engines that the hyperlink should not affect the rankings of the link to prevent spam.