Why should I use the "no follow" attribute?

Question

I would like to know what are good reasons for me to use the "no follow" on my site?

As far as I know, using the "no follow" attribute only effects the page rank of the link I'm linking to, and not mine. I understand why using it is important in user generated content in order to fight spammers, but I can't understand the other reasons that make so much sites use this. Are there ways it can effect a web-site's rank if he linked to a site without a "no follow" attribute although he couldn't vouch for it? Is it just that he doesn't want to make others have better ranks?

Thanks

Answer 1

I think it could affect your own rankings.

Lets say you have a blog which is fairly popular and has reasonable page rank, you disable no follow in the comments. Up pop all sorts of the usual spam/malware links, if you start linking to these pages (which you will be without no follow), some of which contain malware, it seems logical that google will punish you for effectively advertising sites which are intended to damage a users machine.

Answer 2

Really, that is about the only reason to do it is to affect the page rank of the page you would link to. I would use it to fight comment spam, but I would also use it if I wanted to link to something without improving its page rank.

For example, if I was blogging about someone else's site, which for some reason I found offensive or controversial and I did not want my link to improve their page rank, then I would use no follow.

I suppose in a business it might be a policy to use no follow in situations where they did not want to appear that they were endorsing a product. For example, if a journalist wanted to make sure he appeared impartial while still wanting to post links to a product he might use no follow.

Answer 3

The Ans is - It’s no good to waste GoogleBots’ time having ‘em crawl to pages of low public attention just to meet a no index robots Meta tag. Only high class content should make its way into the index, and the less time the Googlebots waste, they more they can spend on finding it. I use lots of internal nofollow links on may major site and it is prooved this is okay.

Answer 4

I think also people would historically put no-follow on for folders like /css or /js to avoid crawlers digging about in directories which would likely have no indexable content