Recently, I was reading an article about Pagerank sculpting, and what I found was shocking! It seems Google is not using the nofollow attribute since more than a year! Google's spam team engineer, Matt Cutts announced on his blog this new change: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ So what happens when you have a page with “ten Pagerank points†and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each. This means the nofollow tag is receiving pagerank, even so, Google announced they changed the way to see at links. This is my theory, the nofollow tag is not longer a link without value, but an option given to the GoogleBot to reject or accept a link as a valid vote. Why Google made this change? Apparently, many obsessed webmasters in their pagerank sculpting madness, start blocking good content within their sites, disallowing the googlebot to access them as well as links to good quality sites. Google changed the way how to see links, again, so for SEO purposes getting nofollow backlinks could be good just by using common sense, getting links from related content sites.