I would like to get some feedback on why you guys use no follow. I personally never use it. Unless I make a post about a company doing wrong to make sure search engines don't confuse my link to them with a recommendation. When and why do you guys use non follow?

Mike

I never use it myself Mike. I suppose it is useful is some situations - like this forum software where some of the internal links to the individual forums use "no follow" in an attempt to avoid duplicate urls for the same page which Google does not like.

I don't think any external links should use "no follow" - even to control comment spam. Better to moderate comments and show that you are in actual control of the links leaving your site and the content on your site. Using "no follow" may just tell search engines that you let anyone post anything to your site - or that you post links that you consider to be of no value. Either way, it may be a flag that your page / site is not necessarily of good value

People use it because many of the blog platforms are set that way by default and the people using them ether are clueless about them, or don't care that lots of people are smart enough to figure it out and will not be back out of principal, or they think that letting links go out to the people who post somehow will drain any domain Authority or link power away from them, which in my opinion is plain wrong.

Agreed. In addition, who you link to has always been an important factor in how search engines rank your site - the links help them know what your site is about (what used to be called themes when it was all the rage years ago). Using "no follow" just tells search engines to not follow the link but they still use the link when determining what your site is about - and how strong your theme is compared to other sites.

So having a bunch of junky links with "no follow" still tells search engines that your site is junk. And if you have good links with "no follow" you are probably telling search engines that you do not consider those good (on theme) links - which would have a negative ranking effect.

Yes Doug, but I very much doubt that most of these people are thinking about who they link to being a problem. If they noticed they were linking to a porn site or something they could just delete that link and ban that IP address. Most do it out of ignorance, and some do it out of a false belief that outgoing links will drain their page rank. All it really does is not encourage many people to come back.

In effect they are hurting their efforts by keeping the no-follow tags on.