Should I keep these links NoFollow or DoFollow?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Stephen Oliver: Hello Experts, ;
  
  Site Information:
  
  15 multilingual site with unique ccTLD under one brand. ;
  
  Product and category pages have same design while written with unique content in local languages. ;
  
  Already coded with href lang code (rel="alternate" hreflang="x") throughout all pages of sites. ;
  
  Display popup based on user IP, so user can select local domain based on location.
  
  Query:
  
  Footer section contain cross domain one to one mapping links between all sites and all pages. ;
  
  Should I keep these links NoFollow or DoFollow?
  
  NoFollow link - Prevents page rank flow to other domain.
  DoFollow link - Distribute page rank to other domain and that may cause manual link penalty.
  
  Can any one suggest me between NoFollow and DoFollow which links are best in above scenario? ;
  
  Thanks
  Stephen Oliver
• 
  Jon Tromans: I'd probably keep the links follow and I'm pretty sure you can use hreflang within the link:
  
  <a href="pageurl" hreflang="de"></a>
  
  I tend to only use nofollow for advertising, sponsorship, paid promotional links etc..
  
  Others may have different views.. interesting question.
• 
  SEMXE: hi +Stephen Oliver,you have taken care of all the precautions that are required in such situations. You can have dofollow links at the footer for your other websites, as you are doing it to help your visitors find different versions of the site, and not to manipulate Google algorithms for rankings. hope that would help.
• 
  Stephen Oliver: Hello ;+Jon Tromans, ;
  
  I am glad to have your reply. However I have never seen the hreflang format as you have given.  ;I am only aware with format given here - ;https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en , ;Where hreflang implemented in only link tag.  ;
  
  I assume that Google can easily understand cross domain one to one linking that I have added for user purpose. But are you sure that Google won't deliver positive OR negative effect due to these thousands of links between multilingual sites. ;
  
  Hello +SEMXE ;, ;
  
  These links are placed only for user perspective, for Google I have already implemented hreflang in source code. ;
  
  Can I have any other suggestions? ;
• 
  Jon Tromans: +Stephen Oliver ;You can use hreflang within a <a> tag but I don't know if Google spots this or just looks at the link rel.
  
  "The hreflang attribute on a and area elements that create hyperlinks, if present, gives the language of the linked resource. It is purely advisory. The value must be a valid BCP 47 language tag. [BCP47] User agents must not consider this attribute authoritative — upon fetching the resource, user agents must use only language information associated with the resource to determine its language, not metadata included in the link to the resource."
  
  From ;http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/links.html
  
  If the links are purely there for users then you should have nothing to worry about - If in doubt though add a nofollow.
• 
  Stephen Oliver: +Jon Tromans ;I have added cross links between sites approx 2.5 yrs before and that time Panda and Penguin algorithms were peak, and my sites also hammered with it so I quickly turned them into nofollow. And also remove manual link penalty during this time. Now company decided to remove nofollow to see the effects.
  
  Now I am also curious to see effects of dofollow links.  ;
• 
  SEMXE: hi +Stephen Oliver, I guess you already done what was required to make Google understand which website version belongs to which location and language.
  
  However, about cross links at footer, just make sure you don't make use of sale keywords as anchor text, that can put you in trouble. Else, everything seems good.
• 
  Stephen Oliver: Hi +SEMXE ;
  
  Yes I already use language name as an anchor text for each country, so it shouldn't create any issue for my site. Thanks for suggestion. ;
  
  Regards
  Stephen Oliver
• 
  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:27:40 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/should_i_keep_these_links_nofollow_or_dofollow +Stephen Oliver
  
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• 
  Stephen Oliver: Hi +Edwin Jonk ;
  
  Thanks for discussing my question in hangout, however I didn't get any specific conclusion out of it. ;
  
  So now I decided to keep dofollow link with page to page cross domain linking with generic anchor text. I'll analyze it for any possible action from Google. ;
  
  Thanks
  Stephen Oliver