Hello all. When nofollow was first introduced it was intended mainly as a means of de-relevancing blog/comment spam for google back linking (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html). However, I get the impression that its use has grown since to apply to nearly any link that you don't want linked to the originating site. My question is, does the this work outside of comments and wiki external links? The reason I ask is that we have a large family of sites and are introducing an "our stores" section that will let users see a list of all our related sites so they can shop for various specific types of item at specific sub sites (unlike many of our competitors we don't just register a bunch of domain names and then put the same database of products on each). While we think this will be useful we also don 't want to get penalized for too much internal cross-linking (and perhaps be identified as a link farm), so if we could use nofollow to accomplish this it'd be great. Does anyone know if nofollow works outside of a blog/comment context?
It does work in any context. It is usually used when one doesn't trust a link - for instance because it is user generated, or because you are linking to a political opponent to make a point, but don't want to increase their link popularity. In the case of related online stores I would not put in rel no follow, because you do trust the links. And since they are all stores, it doesn't sound likely to me that the links will be seen as suspect.
I tend to use nofollow links on my own site in the event I have two links pointing to the same page, where one is an image link (Which is useless in terms of SEO so I use the nofollow on this link) the other is textual and informative and describes the page it links to therefore it has more value ... but yes you may use nofollow on any type of link you want to exclude