On the other hand there are no competitors when you blog (watch out I refer to blogs here again, not corporate sites). There are just blogging colleagues. I blog for clients in different industries and languages. In niches where there are only a few blogs or where bloggers link less than in the SEO industry. Nonetheless I achieved great results. Also I link out like hell on my own SEO 2.0 blog for almost 2 years now and guess who’s #4 for seo blog globally? Me, not the other bloggers I linked out to numerous times.
It’s a very old tactic btw. as Google has been identifying so called “hub sites” for years and pushing them up in the rankings. Hub sites are sites that link out plenty ;-) In case you prefer dead end sites it’s your choice but don’t tell me that linking out does not work just because you don’t know how to do it. I still can’t believe it: Did you just suggest I should link out to competitors?

On the PageRank sculpting thing: When you choose to spend valuable hours of work on that, it’s your choice. It’s tedious and dangerous and as you see now you don’t even know if it works at all in your favor. In case your clients like to pay for that, great for you, not so great for them. I prefer real optimization techniques instead of selectively hurting your own site or by now hurting it altogether.

This may be true for *some* industries, but for the most part, wow do I ever disagree with that statement. If that were the case, I’d be advising my clients to simply link to all their competitors. It’s *much* better to just have the competitor link to my client ;)

As for nofollow, I let the link juice flow freely (both internal and external)… within my posts. Links that are repetitive (i.e. they show up on every page) though (such as my blog roll) are nofollowed everywhere but the homepage. I’m happy with the results and so are the people I link to because 1 homepage link can be more beneficial than the same link sitewide.

Thanks for the post. It was most informative. Shame it never went hot.

I use nofollow at my blog to drive pagerank within my own pages.I no follow most of the links i give out to other blogs or threads from other sites and i knwo that this technique is used by many big sites.I was wondering whether i should stop doing it now that there are those rumors…

What do you suggest?

In this case my profile page is an internal link but all comments are treated the same way, it’s definitely not done for “PageRank sculpting” reasons.

Completely agree that nofollow tags may have a negative impact over how a website is crawled and prevents link value being passed from the blocked pages. Surely “noindex, follow” is a more sensible option in this case? Plus I’ve always felt that contact details/about us/privacy policy/terms and conditions etc (which are often nofollowed links) are very important in terms of highlighting the trust and creditability of a website. So blocking access to these pages because they are not optimised may cause additional problems to a sites overall search performance.