An interesting question was posed to Google's Gary Illyes on Twitter asking if "internal nofollow links devalue the page that it's on?" Gary said that they do not devalue that page and asked why would they. The response from the person who asked was that a former Googler, likely @filiwiese may have said that. Of course, it may have been interpreted that he said that and he didn't really say that.
@semtuts No, why would they?
— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) April 12, 2017
But Gary said that if I place nofollow links on this page that are nofollowing internal links, it won't devalue this page. Maybe what Fili said was that if you nofollow internal links, Google may use that as a stronger signal that the page is not worthy because you have control of what you nofollow and thus, you nofollowing internal pages on your site is a strong signal.
But either way, it seems to me that Google treats nofollowed links one way. A nofollow linked is simply not followed and nothing passes (good or bad) from that link to the page. That shouldn't devalue any page more or less, outside of the link value not passing, as it doesn't with any nofollowed link.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
