Having considered much of the information imparted from the SES London Organic Session yesterday morning I am not sure if I am more or less confused now about the whole rel="nofollow" issue.
Appears to me that if you don't want to get screwed in Google then you should use the rel="nofollow" tag for sites that you link to but which you don't trust. But hold on a minute. If you don't trust the site why in the hell would you link to it in the first place!?
I am now left wondering what the hell the whole point of this rel="nofollow" tag is at all!!
Currently I am using nofollow because I like to air on the side of caution. This is not because I don't trust the sites that I am linking to, its just because after what recently happened to David Naylor I am concerned that there is an algorithmic measure which downgrades your listing in the SERPS based on how many or the ratio of do follow links there are on your site.
I just don't understand the whole concept of this bloody nofollow crap!! To me its just a massive contradiction in every possible way.
I think nofollows wre mainly introduced so website owners could show Google the difference between paid and organic links which follows the policy of Google disliking paid links being used for link building..
In other words, I wouldn't put nofollows on any links that are in the content and are relevant to it as these should be seen as dofollows and should count as a 'vote' because I value the link, but I would if it was for example an affiliate link..