NoFollow For SEO - Good Idea?

To Follow or NoFollow - That is the Question...

The correct use of the rel="nofollow" tag, it has been argued; will help your SEO efforts. Some believe that by eliminating external links from search engine consideration - you'll end up with higher page rank. Others strongly disagree. Some will argue that one place to use it is in internal links going to your privacy policy page, or your contact page... pages on your site that you really have no interest in raising the page rank. I would argue that the search engines aren't stupid - they already realize that most websites have these sorts of pages, and probably are well programmed to ignore them. I certainly don't seem to run into these sorts of webpages - unless I'm specifically looking for them.

This tag, contrary to it's implied purpose, does not tell search engines not to follow a link (some do, others don't), it simply tells search engines not to add weight to a particular link, whether internal or external. For example, JudoInfo.com currently has a page rank of '6' from Google, and they have a number of links pointing to one of my sites, BestJudo.com - and JudoInfo does not use the nofollow tag.  This gives BestJudo credit and benefit from a PR6 site - and indeed, it's partially due to links like this that have brought BestJudo up to a PR5 ranking.

The original purpose of the nofollow tag was to eliminate a problem with comment spam. According to Google:

Comment spam is a headache that everyone who runs a blog is familiar with... you post an interesting article, and you'll end up with comments like: "I found this to be an interesting article, and hope to read more like this in the future" - the comment is meaningless, but the website link will go to the spammer's website, and provide a valuable one-way link for him. By creating the nofollow tag, it was hoped that comment spam would greatly decrease - since much of the value would disappear.

I'm a believer in NOT using the nofollow tag in the comments - it helps to encourage people to comment on my articles - but it also means more work for me, weeding out the comment spam. Most blogs do use it, however - and it's even a default on many CMS scripts... so webmasters may not even realize that they are using the nofollow tag. I would argue that the benefit from allowing commentors to receive one-way links will, in general, outweigh the benefits of using the tag. I want a free flow of comments and ideas - and if giving away one-way links helps me to do that - I'm all for it. What about you?