by default Blogger used to add that code to the blog. They now kept it purposely so that it doesnt pass any PR to the sites they mention on this blog. makes sense?
Let me explain if you dont know. The older blogger version used to add "noindex,nofollow" by default to the template, i meant the default template. If you continue using that there your site is not indexed and followed by google bot. That blog is continuing to use that template and they didnt remove the code. Does that explain now? i hope so. Why google is doing this? Simple google doesnt want to pass any special PR juice to other website coz it will then be against the fair policy. Anyone featured on google will automatically get the PR. If you know some Pr 10 sites have PR disabled, means they cant transfer any PR e.g statcounter. Hope that helps everyone in understanding why google doesnt like to pass any PR juice from their own blogs.
But Google occasionally links to external sites (that they don't own) in their other blogs, e.g http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ and http://googlevideo.blogspot.com/ (post november 29). And in most or all of their other blogs the blogroll links don't have nofollow. I can understand the Co-Op blog people were just lazy and didn't remove it but the idea of not wanting to pass PR juice isn't really consistent with all the other Google blogs. Please point me to Google's "fair policy", everything I've read that Google says about nofollow is that it is to prevent spam not to prevent legitimate editorial links from passing PR. In fact if the internal links were not nofollowed as well I would guess Google ranking factors would view it as spam.
jaybong, you are right. I didnt notice that however overall when i checked the external links, they are all high quality websites such as .edu, wikipedia or one of the google subpages/blogs. They generally dont like to pass the juice to external blogs unless necessary. However i wonder why only some blogs have nofollow? The question is still open but only google knows what they are trying to do with this.
Hopefully someone that knows the answer will eventually find this thread. It's been noted: http://searchengineland.com/070725-165217.php (SEO & SEM) http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014272.html