So I haven’t really looked into this a whole bunch, but apparently there’s something all abuzz about nofollow no longer being the what’s cool (or…doing anything?)
Here’s what I think.
The nofollow attribute had to be done away with because the ability to nofollow links makes Matt Cutts seem somewhat (very) disingenuous every time he claims that all you have to do is make a website with quality content that other sites will want to link to. Well guess what, if link juice is valuable and linking is now run by marketers instead of webmasters, that doesn’t exactly fly since most of those links (from one site to another) are probably nofollowed.
You know what I’d really like to see instead of nofollow? Link attributes like “navigation.” Something to designate that, yes, these category pages are linked to from every other page on the site (via top or side navigation bars), but those links should be ignored because they are there for usability purposes, not because I’m giving them all an equal “vote” of importance.
What about that? (in keeping with my theme) that would be the what’s cool for sure.
What would be cool is if Google stopped feeding people BS. I really never bought into nofollow. Better to use JS to activate links you don’t want spiderable. And make the JS a little more difficult to parse than just sticking it in onlick right inside the anchor tag. At least put it off page.