I heard that's best to do, but I also heard that it's good to have these areas of your site. So have the fluff pages, just add no follows to the links on my index to them?
Absolutely! Your site only carries so much link juice. You should not spend it on links that are generally required, but you don't want them to rank. Having rel="nofollow" doesn't mean they don't get indexed. It just means they don't get any link power which is what you don't need for what I call the utility pages. Not only that, but it's easy and quick to do.
No - its a waste of time. I have several sites in #1 on google and have never bothered with this...... Some will argue that it is necessary but many will also tell you that you will get penalised for "duplicate content". If in doubt, give it a try and see if it helps you at all.
You should use noindex, if anything. But yeah, what's the point? Google has no intention of ever showing pages like that in real search results. Google is a heck of a lot smarter than that. And as far as nofollow goes, it was intended for spammed links not getting PR passed to them. That's it. People have now taken a made-up google tag and morphed it into a bunch of nonsense that it was never intended to be. And nofollow has nothing to do with crawling or indexing. Stephen C
Pagerank sculpting is dead. 2 or 3 years ago would of been the time to do it. It's a waste of time now, and even Matt Cutts talked about it a while back. I can't even remember where the article was.
Like others have said you probably don't need to waste your time on it. Google is much smarter than that.
I add nofollow attributes to all of those links except "about us" page because I would link back to my homepage from my "about us" page. Thanks,
Since Pagerank Sculpting is already dead. It would be no different whether you put nofollow to the link to those pages or not. I would recommend you just leave them as it. If I were you, I would let those page being indexed instead of blocked by nofollow.