It depends on your purpose. It has a use but certainly not the same as the intended design use. A lot has changed since it was originally drafted and designed. I think a better question would be what is it's use and once you understand the answer to that question then you'll know when/if you need to use it.
You're still going to need it to block things like affiliate links in order to comply with Google's guidelines, but other than that, don't think about using it for "sculpting" purposes anymore.
Among other things, yes. Then again, I was always railing against the use of "nofollow" for sculpting purposes. You could say I tell people that nofollow is one of those "make believe" things - and I don't sell that here.
Are you talking about using the rel="nofollow" attribute, or getting nofollow backlinks? Seeing that you posted in link development, I'm assuming it's the latter? Nofollow links don't pass PR or anchor text, but they still get indexed. You need some nofollow links for your link building to look natural as well, as it will look fishy if you only have "do" follow links. Finally, nofollow links on relevant sites have the potential to bring you traffic as well.
Yep. Been saying it for a couple years now. Then again, I tend to put the user first and the search engines second. (It sounds weird, but site owners can make a LOT more money that way.)
For me that's just a common sense thing to do that lots of people just don't seem to get. Still sculpting on a content rich site has loads of benefit IMO. It's like having the best of both worlds.
Yeah, the benefit being that up to 75% of your pages' PageRank simply gets vaporized rather than being passed through to other pages/sites.
I get what your saying but it depends to what extent you do the sculpting. When it's on a blog like wordpress having nofollow on archives, categories and tags as well as any landing pages that might be there, it pushes more rank to the actual posts. I definitely see your point and probably agree that most people screw it up and just make a mess of it. Not to mention Matt hates it too
Not anymore. Google changed that last year and didn't tell anyone until about a month ago. For example, before the change if you had 10 links on a page and 5 of them were nofollow, the PR that would have been passed to the nofollow links would have been given to the regular links. Now, they just disappear.
@Dan: Good to see you active on the forum again. The nofollow change was sure a shocker. I have removed nofollow from internal links as well as from pings / trackbacks !!
Pings and trackbacks I'd probably disable outright. For comments, if you're using WordPress, Chris Beasley (aspen) has a plugin you can use (he also has one for vBulletin). http://www.websitepublisher.net/two-step/
Yup, many people don't like trackbacks. But it's a good way to build a community. Internal pingbacks should either be dofollow or should be disabled ;-)
What??? That's not what I read from Matt... From what I understand, he said that from now on, if you have 10 links, 5 no-follow, 5 do-follow, the do-follow will get more PR points and the no-follow will get a little bit of PR (half if any). Before, it use to be that no-follow got nothing. They did this because, everything is no-follow nowadays. PR rarely seems to spread anymore.
I will take a stab at it. A year ago: PR 10 page has 5 dofollow and 5 nofollow links. PR passed to 5 dofollow links is 'around' 2. No PR is passed to nofollow links. Now (and time between a year ago and now): PR 10 page has 5 dofollow and 5 nofollow links. PR passed to 5 dofollow links is 'around' 1.5. No PR is passed to nofollow links. Around 2.5 worth PR is leaking into vacuum. Number of nofollow links is also affecting the PR passed to other links.
Closer to 1 than 1.5, Jeet. It basically works like this. "You have 10 links. 5 of them are "nofollow". We'll give the 5 regular links their normal amount of PR juice and to Hell with the rest."