A competitor has added the rel="nofollow" attribute to every external link on their site. It is a very large site with thousands of external links to quality sites which they have built up over years. This has nothing to do with comment spam and I can only imagine that they believe this will improve their rankings by hoarding pagerank. What effect if any will it have on their rankings? Improve? Worsen? No change?
They clearly don't understand nofollow and what its for. The good news is that they probably don't understand much about SEO so you can step in and become better than them. If you don't want to link somewhere then don't link there. Linking with nofollow is stupid.
Bill, it seems your competitors misunderstand. What started out as a tool to prevent spam abuse is in itself now becoming a tool of abuse. I would how the people who've got reciprocals feels about it?
It will have no effect on their own rankings (PageRank), but it will have a (very) slight effect on the sites that they link to, as those sites will loose a backlink. Cryo.
It will be like less outbound links from that site. google will not consder them as outbound links. So he is keeping a high proportion of inbound vs outbound which may be helping them in rankings. Thats my view.
IMO if you only have nofollow link out of your website, your website should look pretty spammy to the search engine. I think he will not gain anything and will either stand a chance to loose some place in the SERP. Not sure though, will be intresting to see the result.
I thought the same thing, if every link has the nofollow tag that would definitely look devious. IMO the nofollow tag is pointless - it doesn't stop spam in the least and only harms legitimate sites.