Should you sculpt PageRank using nofollow?
I've seen a few posts (Dave Naylor, Joost de Valk) discussing this over the last few days and thought I'd share my view of it.
Both posts bring up the same analogy, attributed to Matt Cutts:
Nofollowing your internals can affect your ranking in Google, but it's a 2nd order effect.
My analogy is: suppose you've got $100. Would you rather work on getting $300, or would you spend your time planning how to spend your $100 more wisely.
Spending the $100 more wisely is a matter of good site architecture (and nofollowing/sculpting PageRank if you want). But most people would benefit more from looking at how to get to the $300 level.
While I agree in theory, I think that's a bit oversimplified. What if you could re-allocate your $100 more effectively in just a few minutes, then go try to raise it to $300?
Sculpting PageRank is one of those things that can earn a nice benefit in a short period of time, but you can keep tweaking forever for progressively lesser and lesser gains. See the chart on the left.
For example, you probably have links on your site for "log-in", "privacy policy" and other such pages. Go in and nofollow those. How long did that take? Two minutes? That alone probably brought as much benefit as it will to go through every page and carefully sculpt things out.
Knock out a few of those links, then spend your time trying to work on getting $300.